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ESSAY ON BURNS 



PR 4331 
.C3 
1898b 
Copy 1 



BY 
THOMAS CARLYLE 



WITH NOTES 



VOCATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 



BOSTON 



BbYmx CH 't G0 s AN FKANClsco 



29601 



Copyrighted 
By EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY, 

1898. 



WOCOFiK* RECEIVED. 



'399 ) 



CJLi\5" 



I- 




THOMAS CARLYLE. 



CARLYLE. 

Thomas CARLYLEwas born at Ecclefechan, in Annan- 
dale, in the county of Dumfries, Scotland, on December 
4th, 1795, and was the eldest of nine children. His early 
education began at the burgh-school of Annan, from 
which, at the remarkably early age of fourteen, he pro- 
ceeded to the University of Edinburgh, entering the town 
on November 9th, 1809, and retaining to the last the 
most vivid recollection of his impressions of the most 
picturesque of European capitals. He seems to have 
entertained great expectaiions from the University; 
but it was the period at which the national educational 
institutions, both of England and of Scotland, had 
reached their lowest point, and his disappointment he 
has left on record in one of the most familiar pages of 
his Sartor. 

Carlyle had entered the University with the intention 
of becoming a minister of the Church of Scotland; 
but, relinquishing the idea, he accepted in 1814 the post 
of Mathematical Master at Annan, and from that be 
removed in 1816 to Kirkcaldy. Experience, however, 
convinced him that neither in the Church nor in teach- 
ing was his vocation to be found; and, returning to 
Edinburgh with vague prospects of studying law, he 
found work on the staff of Brewster's Edinburgh Ency- 
clopedia. 

An appointment in 1822 as tutor to the family of Mr. 
Buller detained him for two years more in Edinburgh, 
and in the same year he translated Legendre's Geometry, 
prefixing to it an essay on Proportion, which such a 
competent critic as Professor De Morgau pronounced a 



II INTRODUCTION. 

model of exposition and lucidity, and to which Carlyle 
referred long after with feelings of lively satisfaction 
as his first work. 

The year 1824-5 saw Carlyle in London with the Bul- 
lers, and he paid a visit to Paris, and introduced himself 
to Legendre. In 1826 he married Jaue Baillie Welsh, 
the daughter of a Haddington surgeon descended, it was 
believed, from the son-in-law of the Scottish Reformer, 
John Knox, and, settling for a time in Edinburgh, wrote 
for the great Whig organ the Edinburgh Review, whose 
early history constitutes snch an important literary 
landmark in the nineteenth century. 

No two greater contrasts could have been found than 
the ketu, wiry, eagerly practical and alert Jeffrey, and 
the new contributor, whose style, subjects, and treat- 
ment were at once the wonder of the readers and the 
despair of the editor. Carlyle he pronounced to be a 
man of genius, who had the capacity in him for great 
things if — ! Indeed out of the essay on Burns, one of 
the very finest critical efforts of Carlyle, Jeffrey tried to 
excise about one-half, but finally, on the obdurate re- 
monstrances of the writer, he allowed it to stand entire, 
and this great piece of constructive criticism at once 
marked Carlyle as a writer of original power, and 
to-day remains the one perfect utterance on au endless 
subject to which all subsequent editors and critics have 
been content to refer. 

By this time he had retired to the property of his 
wife, Craigenputtock, " at the head (he writes in 1867 
in the deed of bequest by which he left it to the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh) of the parish of Duuscore, in 
Nithsdale, Dumfriesshire." 

In August, 1832, there took place at Craigenputtock 
the famous meeting between him and Emerson — which, 
so often quoted, well merits a place here in Emerson's 



INTRODUCTION. Ill 

own words, from its importance in itself, and as the 
first indication of the long friendship of these two 
remarkable men which was to endure to the close of 
their lives. 

" I came," he says, " from Glasgow to Dumfries, and 
being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought 
from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a 
farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen 
miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I 
took a private carriage from the inn. I found the 
house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely 
scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man 
from his jouth, an author who did not need to hide 
from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, 
unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on 
his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and 
gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding 
his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy com- 
mand; clinging to his northern accent with evident 
relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming 
humor which floated everything he looked upon. His 
talk, playfully exalting the familiar objects, put the 
companion at once into an acquaiutance^with his Lars 
and Lemurs. Few were the objects and lonely the man, 
' not a person to speak to him within sixteen miles, 
except the minister of Dunscore,' so that books inevit- 
ably made his topics, ... We talked of books, 
Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; 
and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a 
hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the 
old world to the new. His own reading had been mul- 
tifarious. Tristram Shandy had been one of his first 
books after Bobinson Crusoe and Robertson's America 
was an early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had dis- 
covered to him that he was not a dunce, and it was now 



IV INTRODUCTION 7 . 

ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of 
a man who told him he would find in that language 
what he wanted. ... He took despairing or satir- 
cal views of literature at this moment. . . . We 
went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criftel, 
then without his cap, and down into Wordsworth's 
country. Here we sat clown and talked of the immor- 
tality of the soul ... he was cognizant of the 
subtle links that bind ages together, and saw how 
every event affects all the future. ' Christ died on the 
tree, that built Dunscore kirk yonder; that brought you 
and me together. Time has only a relative existence.' " 

In this passage the future Carlyle, in every essential 
feature — as a writer, historian, moralist, and political- 
economist — stands revealed : — the whole man indeed, 
as he becomes later known to us, in germ, at least, 
stands before us in this timely visit to him of the genial 
Emerson. 

He left Scotland for London, in the summer of 1834 
and established himself in 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 
which was to be his home till his death in 1881. One of 
his little vignettes .thus describes this home in a letter 
in 1834 to his mother — " We lie safe at a bend of the 
river, away from all the great roads, have air and quiet 
hardly inferior to Craigenputtock, au outlook from the 
bick windows into mere leafy regions, with here and 
there a red high-peaked old roof looking through; and 
see nothing of London, except by day the summits of 
St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and by 
night the gleam of the gre-it Babylon affronting the 
peaceful stars. The house itself is piobably the best 
we have ever lived in — a right old, strong, roomy, brick 
house, built near a hundred and fifty years ago, and 
likely to see three races of the-e modern fashionables 
fall before it comes down." 




p^jdiAf-fb 



tumJ~ 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 
I. 

1. In the modern arrangements of soci- 
ety, it is no uncommon thing that a man of 
genius must, like Butler, " ask for bread and 
receive a stone ;" for, in spite of our grand 
maxim of supply and demand, it is by no s 
means the highest excellence that men are 
most forward to recognize. The inventor of 
a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his reward 
in his own day ; but the writer of a true 
poem, like the apostle of a true religion, isi° 
nearly as sure of the contrary. We do not 
know whether it is not an aggravation of the 
injustice, that there is generally a posthumous 
retribution. Robert Barns, in the course 
of Nature, might yet have been living; but 15 
his short life was spent in toil and penury ; 
and he died, in the prime of his manhood, 
miserable and neglected ; and yet already a 
brave mausoleum shines over his dust, and 

3. Samuel Butler (1612 — 1680). Author of Hudibras. 

8. Spinning Jenny. A machine for spinning cotton, invented by 
James Hargreave', 1767. 

17. Prime of his Manhood, i. e., in his thirty-seventh year, July 21, 

1796. 

5 



6 BURNS. 

more than one splendid monument has been 
reared in other places to his fame ; the street 
where he languished in poverty is called by 
his name ; the highest personages in our lit- 

5 erature have been proud to appear as his 
commentators and admirers ; and here is the 
sixth narrative of his Life that has been 
given to the world ! 

2. Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to 

io apologize for this new attempt on such a 
subject : but his readers, we believe, will 
readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will censure 
only the performance of his task, not the 
choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, 

15 is a theme that cannot easily become either 
trite or exhausted ; and will probably gain 
rather than lose in its dimensions by the dis- 
tance to which it is removed b}^ Time. No 
man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet ; 

20 and this is probably true ; but the fault is at 
least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. 
For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye few 
things are wonderful that are not distant. It 
is difficult for men to believe that the man, 

25 the mere man whom they see, nay perhaps 



9. John Gibson Lockhart (I'M — 1854). Son-in-law and a biographer 
of Sir Walter Scott. 



BURNS. 7 

painfully feel, toiling at their side through 
the poor jostlings of existence, can be made 
of finer clay than themselves. Suppose that 
some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas 
Lucy's, and neighbor of John a Combe's, s 
had snatched an hour or two from the preser- 
vation of his game, and written us a Life of 
Shakspeare ! What dissertations should we 
not have had, — not on "Hamlet " and " The 
Tempest," but on the wool-trade, and deer-io 
stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws ; and 
how the Poacher became a Player ; and how 
Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian 
bowels, and did not push him to extremities ! 
In like manner, we believe, with respects 
to Burns, that till the companions of his 
pilgrimage, the Honorable Excise Commis- 
sioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian 
Hunt, and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all 
the Squires and Earls, equally with the Ay 1*20 
Writers, and the New and Old Light Clergy, 

4. Sir Thomas Lucy. Landed Proprietor in Shakespeare's time, 
who, according to the legend, persecuted young Shakespeare for " deer 
stalking." 

5. John a Com^e. Another wealthy resident of Stratford. Both 
persons are said to have been satirized in a ballad by Shakespeare. 

18. The Caledonian Hunt. An aristocratic club of Scotch noblemen. 

20. Ayr Writers. Lawyers, legal agents, i. e., professional people. 

21. New and Old Light Clergy. Two factions in the Scotch Church. 
Burns favored the "New Lights " or liberal party. 



8 . BURNS. 

whom he had to do with, shall have become 
invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visi- 
ble only by light borrowed from his juxtapo- 
sition, it will be difficult to measure him by 

5 any true standard, or to estimate what he 
really was and did, in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, for his country and the world. It will 
be difficult, we say; but still a fair problem 
for literary historians ; and repeated attempts 

10 will give us repeated approximations. 

3. His former Biographers have done 
something, no doubt, but by no means a 
great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie and Mr. 
Walker, the principal of these writers, have 

15 both, we think, mistaken one essentially 
important thing : Their own and the world's 
true relation to their author, and the style in 
which it became such men to think and to 
speak of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the 

20 poet truly ; more perhaps than he avowed to 
his readers, or even to himself; yet he every- 
where introduces him with a certain patron- 
izing, apologetic air ; as if the polite public 
might think it strange and half unwarranta- 

25 ble that he, a man of science, a scholar and 

13. Dr. Currie. James Currie, edited an edition of Burns's Poems. 
1800. 

14. Mr. Walker. Josiah Walker, editor of a later edition, 1811. 



BURNS. 9 

gentleman, should do such honor to a t j- 
tic. In all this, however, we readily admit 
that his fault was not want of love, but 
weakness of faith ; and regret that the first 
and kindest of all our poet's biographers 5 
should not have seen farther, or believed 
more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker 
offends more deeply in the same kind : and 
both err alike in presenting us with a 
detached catalogue of his several supposed 10 
attributes, virtues and vices, instead of a 
delineation of the resulting character as a liv- 
ing unity. This, how r ever, is not painting a 
portrait ; but guaging the length and breadth 
of the several features, and jotting down 15 
their dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. 
Nay it is not so much as that : for we are 
yet to learn by what arts or instruments the 
mind could be so measured and guaged. 

4. Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say 20 
has avoided both these errors. He uniformly 
treats Burns as the high and remarkable man 
the public voice has now pronounced him to 
be; and in delineating him, he has avoided 
the method of separate generalities, and 25 
rather sought for characteristic incidents, 
habits, actions, sayings ; in a word, for 



10 BURNS. 

aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he 
looked and lived anions: his fellows. The 
book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, 
gives more insight, we think, into the true 

5 character of Burns, than any prior biogra- 
phy : though, being written on the very 
popular and condensed scheme of an article 
for " Constable's Miscellany," it has less 
depth than we could have wished and ex- 

lopected from a writer of such power; and 
contains rather more, and more multifarious 
quotations than belong of right to an original 
production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's own 
writing is generally so good, so clear, direct 

15 and nervous, that we seldom wish to see it 
making place for another man's. However, 
the spirit of the work is throughout candid, 
tolerant and anxiously conciliating ; compli- 
ments and praises are iiberally distributed, 

20 on all hands, to great and small ; and, as Mr. 
Morris Birkbeck observes of the society in 
the back woods of America, "the courtesies 
of polite life are never lost sight of for a 



8. " Constable's Miscellany." A series of cheap editions of standard 
works issued by Constable, tlie famous publisher of Edinburgh, Scot- 
land Constable was Sir Walter Scott's publisher. 

21. Mr. 'Morris Birkbeck. Author of Notes on a Journey in America, 
from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois (1818) and Let- 
ters from Illinois (1818). 



BURNS. 11 

moment." But there are better things than 
these in the volume ; and we can safely tes- 
tify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly 
read a first time, but may even be without 
difficulty read again. 5 

5. Nevertheless, we are far from thinking 
that the problem of Burns's Biography has 
yet been adequately solved. We do not 
allude so much to deficiency of facts or docu- 
ments, — though of these we are still every 10 
day receiving some fresh accession, — as to 
the limited and imperfect application of them 
to the great end of Biography. Our notions 
upon this subject may perhaps appear extrav- 
agant ; but if an individual is really of conse-15 
quence enough to have his life and character 
recorded for public remembrance, we have 
always been of opinion that the public ought 
to be made acquainted with all the inward 
springs and relations of his character. How 20 
did the world and man's life, from his partic- 
ular position, represent themselves to his 
mind? How did coexisting circumstances 
modify him from without; how did he 
modify these from within? With what 25 
endeavors and what efficacy rule over them ; 
with what resistance and what suffering sink 



12 BURNS. 

under them? In one word, what and how 
produced was the effect of society on him : 
what and how produced was his effect on 
society ? He who should answer these ques- 

5 tions, in regard to any individual, w 7 ould, as 
we believe, furnish a model of perfection in 
Biography. Few T individuals, indeed, can 
deserve such a study ; and many lives will be 
written, and, for the gratification of innocent 

10 curiosity, ought to be written, and read and 
forgotten, which are not in this sense biogra- 
phies. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one 
of these few individuals ; 'and such a study, 
at least with such a result, he has not yet 

15 obtained. Our own contributions to it, we 
are aware, can be but scanty and feeble ; but 
we offer them with good-will, and trust they 
may meet with acceptance from those they 
are intended for. 

II. 

20 6. Burns first came upon the world as a 
prodigy ; and w r as, in that character, enter- 
tained by it, in the usual fashion, with loud, 
vague, tumultuous w r onder, speedily subsid- 
ing into censure and neglect ; till his early 

25 and most mournful death again awakened an 
enthusiasm for him, which, especially as there 



BURNS. 13 

was now nothing to be done, and much to be 
spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own 
time. It is true, the w nine days " have long 
since elapsed; and the very continuance of 
this clamour proves that Burns was no vulgar 5 
wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judg- 
ments, where, as years passed by, he has 
come to rest more and more exclusively on 
his own intrinsic merits, and may now be 
well-nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he 10 
appears not only as a true British poet, but 
as one of the most considerable British men 
of the eighteenth century.. Let it not be 
objected that he did little. He did much, if 
we consider where and how. If the work 15 
performed was small, we must remember that 
he had his very materials to discover ; for 
the metal he worked in lay hid under the 
desert moor, where no eye but his had 
guessed its existence; and we may almost 20 
say, that with his own hand he had to con- 
struct the tools for fashioning it. For he 
found himself in deepest obscurity, without 
help, without instruction, without model ; or 
with models only of the meanest sort. An 25 
educated man stands, as it were, in the midst 
of a boundless arsenal and magazine,, filled 



14 BURNS. 

with all the weapons and engines which man's 
skill has been able to devise from the earliest 
time ; and he works, accordingly, with a 
strength borrowed from all past ages. How 

5 different is his state who stands on the out- 
side of that storehouse, and feels that its 
o-ates must be stormed, or remain forever 
shut against him ! His means are the com- 
monest and rudest ; the mere work done is 

10 no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind 
his steam engine may remove mountains ; 
but no dwarf will hew them down with a 
piek-axe ; and he must be a Titan that hurls 
them abroad with his arms. 

15 7. It is in this last shape that Burns pre- 
sents himself. Born in an age the most pro- 
saic Britain had yet seen, and in a condition 
the most disadvantageous, where his mind, if 
it accomplished aught, must accomplish it un- 

20 der the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay of 
penury and desponding apprehension of the 
worst evils, and with no furtherance but such 
knowledge as dwells in a poor man's hut, and 
the rhymes of a Ferguson or Bamsay for his 

25 standard of beauty, he sinks not under all 
these impediments : through the fogs and 

24. Ferguon or Ramtay. Robert Ferguson (1750 — 1774) Allan Ram- 
say (1685 — 1758) two Scottish poets greatly admired by Burns, 



BURNS. 15 

darkness of that obscure region, his lynx eye 
discerns the true relations of the world and 
human life ; he grows into intellectual 
strength, and trains himself into intellectual 
expertness. Impelled by the expansive 5 
movement of his own irrepressible soul, he 
struggles forward into the general view ; 
and with haughty modesty lays down before 
us, as the fruit of his labor, a gift, which 
Time has now pronounced imperishable. 10 
Add to all this, that his darksome drudging 
childhood and youth was by far the kindliest 
era of his whole life ; and that he died in his 
thirty-seventh year : and then ask, if it be 
strange that his poems are imperfect, and of 15 
small extent, or that his genius attained no 
mastery in its art? Alas, his Sun shone as 
through a tropical tornado ; and the pale 
Shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon ! 
Shrouded in such baleful vapors, the genius 20 
of Burns was never seen in clear azure splen- 
dor, enlightening- the world : but some 
beams from it did, by fits, pierce through ; 
and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and 
orient colors, into a glory and stern gran- 25 
deur, which men silently gazed on with 
wonder and tears ! 



16 BURNS. 

8. We are anxious not to exaggerate; 
for it is exposition rather than admiration 
that our readers require of us here ; and yet 
to avoid some tendency to that side is no 

5 easy matter. We love Burns, and we pity 
him ; and love and pity are prone to mag- 
nify. Criticism, it is sometimes thought, 
should be a cold business ; we are not so sure 
of this ; but, at all events, our concern with 

io Burns is not exclusively that of critics. 
True and genial as his poetry must appear, 
it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that 
he interests and affects us. He was often 
advised to write a tragedy ; time and means 

16 were not lent him for this ; but through life 
he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deep- 
est. We question whether the world has 
since witnessed so utterly sad a scene ; 
whether Napoleon himself, left to brawl with 

-"•Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock, 
"amid the melancholy main," presented to 
the reflecting mind such a " spectacle of pity 
and fear" as did this intrinsically nobler, 
gentler and perhaps greater soul, wasting 

25 itself away in a hopeless struggle with base 



20. Sir Hudson Loire. British Governor of St. Helena during Napo- 
leon's captivity. 



• BURNS. 17 

entanglements, which coiled closer and closer 
round him, till only death opened him an 
outlet. Conquerors are a class of men with" 
whom, for most part, the world could well 
dispense; nor can the hard intellect, the un-s 
sympathizing loftiness and high but selfish 
enthusiasm of such persons inspire us in" 
general with any affection : at best it may 
excite amazement; and their fall, like that 
of a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain 10 
sadness and awe. But a true poet, a man in 
whose heart resides some effluence of Wis-' 
dom, some tone of the "Eternal Melodies," 
is the most precious gift that can be bestowed 
on a generation : we see in him a freer, purer is 
development of whatever is noblest in our- 
selves : his life is a rich lesson to us ; and we 
mourn his death as that of a benefactor who 
loved and taught us. 

9. Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, 20 
bestowed on us in Robert Burns ; but with 
queenlike indifference she cast it from her 
hand, like a thing of no moment ; and it was 
defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, 
before we recognized it. To the ill-starred » 
Burns was given the power of making man's 
life more venerable, but that of wisely guid- 



18 BURNS. • 

ing his own life was not given. Destiny, — 
for so in our ignorance we must speak, — his 
faults, the faults of others, proved too hard 
for him ; and that spirit, which might have 

5 soared could it but have walked, soon sank 
to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden 
under foot in the blossom ; and died, we may 
almost say, without ever having lived. And 
so kind and warm a soul ; so full of inborn 

10 riches, of love to all living and lifeless 
things ! How his heart flows out in sympathy 
over universal Nature ; and in her bleakest 
provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning ! 
The " Daisy " falls not unheeded under his 

15 ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of that 
" wee, cowering, timorous beastie," cast forth, 
after all its provident pains, to "thole the 
sleety dribble and cranreuch cauld." The 
"hoar visage" of Winter delights him; he 

20 dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness 
in these scenes of solemn desolation ; but the 
voice of the tempest becomes an anthem to 
his ears ; he loves to walk in the sounding 
woods, ft for it raises his thoughts to Him that 

i&walketh on the icings of the wind." A true 
Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and 
the sound it yields will be music ! But ob- 



BURNS. 19 

serve him chiefly as he mingles with his 
brother men. What warm, all-comprehend- 
ing fellow-feeling ; what trustful, boundless 
love ; what generous exaggeration of the 
object loved ! His rustic friend, his nut- 5 
brown maiden, are no longer mean and 
homely, but a hero and a queen, whom he 
prizes as the paragons of Earth. The rough 
scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in 
any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude con- 10 
tradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too 
harsh reality, are still lovely to him : Poverty 
is indeed his companion, but Love also, and 
Courage ; the simple feelings, the worth, the 
nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof, 15 
are dear and venerable to his heart : and thus 
over the lowest provinces of man's existence 
he pours the glory of his own soul ; and they 
rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and 
brightened into a beauty which other eyes 20 
discern not in the highest. He has a just 
self-consciousness, which too often degener- 
ates into pride ; yet it is a noble pride, for de- 
fence, not for offence ; no cold suspicious feel- 
ing, but a frank and social one. The Peasant 25 



10. Arcadian tlhi*io?i Arcadia, in the Peloponnesus, Greece, prover- 
bial in poetry for the quiet, peaceful and pastoral life of its inhabitants. 



20 BURNS. 

Poet bears himself, we might say, like a King 
in exile : he is cast among the low, and feels 
himself equal to the highest ; yet he claims 
no rank, that none may be disputed to him. 
5 The forward he can repel, the supercilious he 
can subdue ; pretensions of wealth or ances- 
try are of no avail with him ; there is a fire 
in that dark eye, under which the "insolence 
of condescension" cannot thrive. In his 
10 abasement, in his extreme need, he forgets 
not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and 
Manhood. And yet, far as he feels himself 
above common men, he wanders not apart 
from them, but mixes warmly in their inter- 
ests; nay, throws himself into their arms, 
and, as it were, entreats them to love him. 
It is moving to see how, in his darkest 
despondency, this proud being still seeks 
relief from friendship ; unbosoms himself, 
go often to the unworthy ; and, amid tears, 
strains to his glowing heart a heart that 
knows only the name of friendship. And 
yet he was " quick to learn ;" a man of keen 
vision, before whom common disguises af- 
25 forded no concealment. His understanding 
saw through the hollowness even of accom- 
plished deceivers ; but there was a generous 



BURNS. 21 

credulity in his heart. And so did our 
Peasant show himself among us ; " a soul like 
an iEolian harp, in whose strings the vulg'ar 
wind, as it passed through them, changed 
itself into articulate melody." And this was 5 
he for whom the world found no fitter busi- 
ness than quarrelling with smugglers and 
vintners, computing excise dues upon tallow, 
and guaging ale-barrels ! In such toils was 
that mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted : and a 10 
hundred years may pass on, before another 
such is given us to waste. 

III. 

10. All that remains of Burns, the Writ- 
ings he has left, seem to us, as w T e hinted 
above, no more than a poor mutilated frac-is 
tion of what was in him ; brief, broken 
glimpses of a genius that could never show 
itself complete ; that wanted all things for 
completeness ; culture, leisure, true effort, 
nay, even length of life. His poems are, 20 
with scarcely any exception, mere occasional 
effusions ; poured forth with little premedita- 
tion ; expressing, by such means as offered, 
the passion, opinion, or humor of the hour. 
Never in one instance was it permitted him 25 



22 BURNS. 

to grapple with any subject with the full col- 
lection of his strength, to fuse and mould it 
in the concentrated fire of his genius. To 
try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect 

5 fragments, would be at once unprofitable and 
unfair. Nevertheless, there is something in 
these poems, marred and defective as they 
are, which forbids the most fastidious student 
of poetry to pass them by. Some sort of 

10 enduring quality they must have : for after 
fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic 
taste, they sti-11 continue to be read ; nay, are 
read more and more eagerly, more and more 
extensively ; and this not only by literary 

15 virtuosos, and that class upon whom transi- 
tory causes operate most strongly, but by all 
classes, down to the most hard, unlettered 
and truly natural class, who read little, and 
especially no poetry, except because they find 

20 pleasure in it. The grounds of so singular 
and wide a popularity, which extends, in a 
literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and 
over all regions where the English tongue is 
spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After 

25 every just deduction, it seems to imply some 
rare excellence in these works. What is that 
excellence ? 



BURNS. 23 

11. To answer this question will not lead 
us far. The excellence of Burns is, indeed, 
among the rarest, whether in poetry or prose ; 
but, at the same time, it is pJain and easily 
recognized: his Sincerity, his indisputable 5 
air of Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or 
joys ; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities ; 
no wiredrawn rehnings, either in thought or 
feeling : the passion that is traced before us 
has glowed in a living heart; the opinion 10 
he utters has risen in his own understanding, 
and been a light to his own steps. He does 
not write from hearsay, but from sight and 
experience : it is the scenes that he has lived 
and labored amidst, that he describes : those 15 
scenes, rude and humble as they are, have 
kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, noble 
thoughts and definite resolves ; and he speaks 
forth what is in him, not from any outward 
call of vanity or interest, but because his 20 
heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it 
with such melody and modulation as he can ; 
e 'in homely rustic jingle ; " but it is his own, 
and genuine. This is the grand secret for 
finding readers and retaining them : let him 25 
who would move and convince others, be first 
moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, 



24 BURNS. 

Si vis meflere, is applicable in a wider sense 
than the literal one. To every poet, to every 
writer, we might say : Be true, if you would 
be believed. Let a man but speak forth with 

5 genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, 
the actual condition of his own heart ; and 
other men, so strangely are we all knit together 
by the tie of sympathy, must and will give 
heed to him. In culture, in extent of view, 

l0 we may stand above the speaker, or below 
him ; but in either case, his words, if they are 
earnest and sincere, will find some response 
within us ; for in spite of all casual varieties 
in outward rank or inward, as face answers 

l5 to face, so does the heart of man to man. 
12. This may appear a very simple prin- 
ciple, and one which Burns had little merit 
in discovering. True, the discovery is easy 
enough : but the practical appliance is not 

20 easy ; is indeed the fundamental difficulty 
which all poets have to strive w r ith, and which 
scarcely one in the hundred ever fairly sur- 
mounts. A head too dull to discriminate the 
true from the false ; a heart too dull to love 

.^the one at all risks, and to hate the other in 



1. Si vis meflerei dolendum est primum ipsi tibi. If you wish me to 
weep, you must mourn first yourself. 



BURNS. 25 

spite of all temptations, are alike fatal to a 
writer. With either, or as more commonly 
happens, with both of these deficiencies com- 
bine a love of distinction, a wish to be orig- 
nal, which is seldom wanting, and we haves 
Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, 
its elder brother, is of morals. How often 
does the one and the other front us, in poetry, 
as in life ! Great poets themselves are not 
always free of this vice ; nay, it is precisely 10 
on a certain sort and degree of greatness that 
it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong 
effort after excellence will sometimes solace 
itself with a mere shadow of success ; he who 
has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold is 
it imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no 
common man : yet if we examine his poetry 
with this view, we shall find it far enough 
from faultless. Generally speaking, we 
should say that it is not true. He refreshes 20 
us, not with the divine fountain, but too 
often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating 
indeed to the taste, but soon ending in dis- 
like, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and 
Giaours, we would ask, real men; we mean, 25 
poetically consistent and conceivable men? 
Do not these characters, does not the char- 



26 BURNS. 

acter of their author, which more or less 
shines through them all, rather appear a 
thing put on for the occasion ; no natural 
or possible mode of being, but something 

5 intended to look much grander than nature? 
Surely, all these stormful agonies, this vol- 
canic heroism, superhuman contempt and 
moody desperation, with so much scowling, 
and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous 

10 humor, is more like the brawling of a player 
in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three 
hours, than the bearing of a man in the busi- 
ness of life, which is to last three-score 
and ten years. To our minds there is 

15 a taint of this sort, something which we 
should call theatrical, false, affected in every 
one of these otherwise so powerful pieces. 
Perhaps " Don Juan," especially the latter 
parts of it, is the only thing approaching to 

20 a sincere work, he ever wrote ; the only work 
where he showed himself, in any measure, as 
he was ; and seemed so intent on his subject 
as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet 
Byron hated this vice ; we believe, heartily 

25 detested it : nay he had declared formal war 
against it in words. So difficult is it even 
for the strongest to make this primary attain- 



BURNS. 27 

ment, which might seem the simplest of all ; 
to read its own consciousnesss without mis- 
takes, without errors involuntary or wilful ! 
We recollect no poet of Burns's susceptibility 
who comes before us from the first, and abides 5 
with us to the last, with such a total want of 
affectation. He is an honest man, and an 
honest writer. In his successes and his fail- 
ures, in his greatness and his littleness, he is 
ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no 10 
lustre but his own. We reckon this to be a 
great virtue ; to be, in fact, the root of most 
other virtues, literary as well as moral. 

13. Here, however, let us say, it is to the 
Poetry of Burns that we now allude ; to those 15 
writings which he had time to meditate, and 
where no special reason existed to warp his 
critical feeling, or obstruct his endeavor to 
fulfil it. Certain of his Letters, and other 
fractions of prose composition, by no means 20 
deserve this praise. Here, doubtless, there 
is not the same natural truth of style ; but 
on the contrary, something not only stiff', 
but strained and twisted ; a certain high- 
flown inflated tone; .the stilting emphasis25 
of which contrasts ill with the firmness and 
rugged simplicity of even his poorest verses. 



28 BURNS. 

Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether 
unaffected. Does not Shakespeare himself 
sometimes premeditate the sheerest bombast ! 
But even with regard to these Letters of 

5 Burns, it is but fair to state that he had two 
excuses. The first was his comparative 
deficiency in language. Burns, though for 
most part he writes with singular force and 
even gracefulness, is not master of English 

10 prose, as he is of Scottish verse ; not master 
of it, we mean, in proportion to the depth 
and vehemence of his matter. These Letters 
strike us as the effort of a man to express 
something which he has no organ fit for 

15 expressing. But a second and weightier 
excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of 
Burns's social rank. His correspondents are 
often men whose relation to him he has never 
accurately ascertained ; whom therefore he is 

20 either forearming himself against, or else 

% unconsciously flattering, by adopting the 
st}de he thinks will please them. At all 
events we should remember that these faults, 
even in his Letters, are not the rule, but the 

25 exception. Whenever he writes, as one 
would ever wish to do, to trusted friends 
and on real interests, his style becomes sim- 



BURNS. 29 

pie, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even 
beautiful. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop are 
uniformly excellent. 

14. But we return to his Poetry. In 
addition to its Sincerity, it has another pecu-s 
liar merit, which indeed is but a mode, or 
perhaps a means, of the foregoing : this dis- 
plays itself in his choice of subjects ; or 
rather in his indifference as to subjects, and 
the power he has of making all subjects inter- 10 
esting. The ordinary poet, like the ordinary 
man, is forever seeking in external circum- 
stances the help which can be found only in 
himself. In what is familiar and near at hand, 
he discerns no form or comeliness : home is 15 
not poetical but prosaic ; it is in some past, 
distant, conventional heroic world, that 
poetry resides ; were he there and not 
here, were he thus and not so, it would 
be well with him. Hence our innumerable 20 
host of rose-colored Novels and iron-mailed 
Epics, with their locality not on the Earth, 
but somewhere nearer to the Moon. Hence 
our Virgins of the Sun, and our Knights of 
the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, and 25 

2. Mrs. Dunlop. Burns's first edition of his poems happened to 
attract the attention of Mrs. Dunlop, a wealthy resident of the district. 
She was ever afterward a valued friend of Burns. His letters to Mrs. 
Dunlop formed a large part of all his subsequent correspondence. 



30 BURNS. 

copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, and so 
many other truculent figures from the heroic 
times and the heroic climates, who on all 
hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with 
5 them ! But jet, as a great moralist proposed 
preaching to the men of this century, so 
would we fain preach to the poets, "a sermon 
on the duty of staying at home." Let them 
be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates 

lccan do little for them. That form of life has 
attraction for us, less because it is better or 
nobler than our own, than simply because it 
is different ; and even this attraction must 
be of the most transient sort. For will not 

15 our own age, one day, be an ancient one; 
and have as quaint a costume as the rest ; 
not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but 
ranked along with them, in respect of quaint*- 
ness? Does Homer interest us now, because 

20 he wrote of what passed beyond his native 
Greece, and two centuries before he was 
born ; or because he wrote what passed in 
God's world, and in the heart of man, which 
is the same after thirty centuries ? Let our 

25 poets look to this: is their feeling really 
finer, truer, and their vision deeper than 
that of other men, — they have nothing to 



BURNS. 31 



fear, even from the humblest subject; is it 
no t so, — tliey have nothing to hope, but an 
ephemereal favor, even from the highest. 

15. The poet, we imagine, can never have 
far to seek for a subject : the elements of his 5 
art are in him, and around him on every 
hand ; for him the Ideal world is not remote 
from the Actual, but under it and within it: 
nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can 
discern it there. Wherever there is a sky 10 
above him, and a world around him, the poet 
is in his place ; for here too is man's exis- 
tence, with its infinite longings and small 
acquirings; its ever- thwarted, ever-renewed 
endeavors; its unspeakable aspirations, its 15 
fears and hopes that wander through Eter- 
nity ; and all the mystery of brightness and 
of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age 
or climate, since man first began to live. Is 
there n'ot the fifth act of a Tragedy in every so 
death-bed, though it were a peasant's and a 
bed of heath? And are wooings and wed- 
' dings obsolete, that there can be Comedy no 
longer? Or are men suddenly grown wise, 
that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, 25 
but be cheated of his farce? Man's life and 
nature is, as it was, and as it will ever be. 



32 BUKNS. 

But the poet must have an eye to read these 
things, and a heart to understand them; or 
they come and pass away before him in vain. 
He is a vates, a seer ; a gift of vision has 

5 been given him. Has life no meanings for 
him, which another cannot equally decipher; 
then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not 
make him one. 

16. In this respect, Burns, though not 

io perhaps absolutely a great poet, better mani- 
fests his capability, better proves the truth 
of his genius, than if he had by his own 
strength kept the whole Minerva Press going, 
to the end of his literary course. He shows 

15 himself at least a poet of Nature's own mak- 
ing; and Nature, after all, is still the grand 
agent in making poets. We often hear of 
this and the other external condition being 
requisite for the existence of a poet. Some- 

20 times it is a certain sort of training; he 
must have studied certain things, studied 
for instance "the elder dramatists," and so 
learned a poetic language ; as if poetry lay 
in the tongue, not in the heart. At other 

4. Vates (Latin). Poet, prophet, foreteller. 

7. Delphi. A town in Greece; seat of the famous oracle of Apollo. 

13. Minerva Press. A publishing house in London, England, famous 
in the eighteenth century for its immense issues of " cheap " literature. 



BURNS. 33 

times we are told he must be bred in a 
certain rank, and must be on a confidential 
footing with the higher classes ; because, 
above "all things, he must see the world. As 
to seeing the world, we apprehend this will 5 
cause him little difficulty, if he have but eye- 
sight to see it with. Without eyesight, indeed, 
the task might be hard. The blind or the pur- 
blind man "travels from Dan to Beersheba, 
and finds it all barren." But happily every 10 
poet is born in the world ; and sees it, with 
or against his will, every day and every hour 
he lives. The mysterious workmanship of 
man's heart, the true light and the inscrutable 
darkness of man's destiny, reveal themselves is 
not only in capital cities and crowded saloons, 
but in every hut and hamlet where men have 
their abode. Nay, do not the elements of all 
human virtues and all human vices ; the pas- 
sions at once of a Borgia and a Luther, lie 20 
written, in stronger or fainter lines, in the 
consciousness of every individual bosom, that 
has practiced honest self-examination ? Truly 



9. Dan to Beersheba. The most Northern and Southern cities of 
Palestine. Similar to our phrase, from Maine to California. 

20. Borgia. A powerful Italian family of the fifteenth century, cele- 
hrated for its ability and its monstrous crimes. 

Luther. The leader of the German Reformation. 



34 BURNS. 

this same world may be seen in Mossgiel and 
Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it 
ever came to light in Crockford's, or the 
Tuileries itself. 

5 17. But sometimes still harder requisi- 
tions are laid on the poor aspirant to poetry ; 
for it is hinted that he should have been born 
two centuries ago ; inasmuch as poetry, 
about that date, vanished from the earth, 

10 and became no longer attainable by men ! 
Such cobweb speculations have, now and 
then, overhung the field of literature ; but 
they obstruct not the growth of any plant 
there : the Shakspeare or the Burns, uncon- 

lssciously and merely as he walks onward, 
silently brushes them awa} r . Is not every 
genius an impossibility till he appear? Why 
do we call him new and original, if ive saw 
where his marble was lying, and what fabric 

20 he could rear from it? It is not the material 
but the workman that is wanting. It is not 
the dark place that hinders, but the dim eye. 
A Scottish peasant's life was the meanest and 
rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet 

1. Mossgiel. A farm in Scotland where Burns lived. 

2. Tarbolton. a town in Scotland; later residence of Burns. 

3. C rock/or d's. A famous Club-house in London. 

4. Tuileries. A royal residence in Paris. 



BURNS. 35 

in it, and a poet of it ; found it a man's life, 
and therefore .significant to men. A thou- 
sand battle-fields remain unsung ; but the 
Wounded Hare has not perished without its 
memorial : a balm of mercy yet breathes on s 
us from its dumb agonies, because a poet 
was there. Our Halloween had passed and 
repassed, in rude awe and laughter, since the 
era of the Druids : but no Theocritus, till 
Burns, discerned in it the materials of aw 
Scottish Idyl: neither was the Hohj Fair 
any Council of Trent or Roman Jubilee ; but 
nevertheless, Superstition and Hypocrisy and 
Fun having been propitious to him, in this 
man's hand it became a poem, instinct with is 
satire and genuine comic life. Let but the 
true poet be given us, we repeat it, place him 
where and how you will, and true poetry will 
not be wanting. 

18. Independently of the essential gift of 20 
poetic feeling, as we have now attempted to 
describe it, a certain rugged sterling worth 
pervades whatever Burns has written ; a vir- 
tue, as of green fields and mountain breezes, 

9. Druids. Priests of the Ancient Celts. 

Theocritus. A poet of Greece, famous for his pastoral poetry. 
12. Council of Trent. A famous council of the Catholic Church, 
beginning in 1545. 

Roman Jubilee. A special church celebration at Rome. 



36 BURNS. 

dwells in his poetry ; it is redolent of natural 
life and hardy natural men. There is a deci- 
sive strength in him, and yet a sweet native 
gracefulness : he is tender, he is vehement, 

5 yet without constraint or too visible effort ; 
he melts the heart, or inflame* it, with a 
power which seems habitual and familiar to 
him. We see that in this man there was the 
gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, 

10 with the deep earnestness, the force and pas- 
sionate ardor of a hero. Tears lie in him, 
and consuming fire ; as lightning lurks in 
drops of the summer cloud. He has a reso- 
nance in his bosom for every note of human 

is feeling; the high and the low, the sad, the 
ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their 
turns to his " lightly-moved and all-conceiv- 
ing spirit." And observe with what a fierce 
prompt force he grasps his subject, be it 

20 what it may ! How he fixes, as it were, the 
full image of the matter in his eye ; full and 
clear in every lineament ; and catches the 
real type and essence of it, amid a thousand 
accidents and superficial circumstances, no 

25 one of which misleads him ! Is it of reason ; 
some truth to be discovered? No sophistry, 
no vain surface-logic detains him ; quick, 



BURKS. 37 

resolute, unerring, he pierces through into 
the marrow of the question : and speaks his 
verdict with an emphasis that cannot be for- 
gotten. Is it of description ; some visual 
object to be represented? No poet of any 5 
age or nation is more graphic than Burns : 
the characteristic features disclose themselves 
to him at a glance ; three lines from his hand, 
and we have a likeness. And, in that rough 
dialect, in that rude, often awkward metre, 10 
so clear and definite a likeness ! It seems a 
draughtsman working with a burnt stick ; 
and yet the burin of a Ketzsch is not more 
expressive or exact. 

19. Of this last excellence, the plainest 15 
and most comprehensive of all, being indeed 
the root and foundation of every sort of 
talent, poetical or intellectual, we could pro- 
duce innumerable instances from the writings 
of Burns. Take these glimpses of a snow- 20 
storm from his " Winter Night " (the italics 
are ours) ; 

When biting Boreas, fell and doure, 
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, . 
And Phoebus c/ies a short-lived gloi&r 25 

13. Retzach. Moritz Ketzsch. A German etcher and painter (1779- 
1857), best known for his illustrations of Goethe and Schiller. 
23. Fell. Keen. 
Doure. Stern. 



38 BURNS. 

Far south the lift, 
Dim-darkening thro' the flaky shoiv'r, 
Or whirling drift: 

'Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
5 Poor labor sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
While burns wi' snawy wreeths apchoJc'd 

Wild-eddying swh irl, 
Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd, 
Down headlong hurl. 

10 Are there not "descriptive touches " here ? 
The describer saw this thing ; the essential 
feature and true likeness of every circum- 
stance in it; saw, and hot with the eye only. 
" Poor labor locked in sweet sleep ;" the dead 

is stillness of man, unconscious, vanquished, 
yet not unprotected, while such strife of the 
material elements rages, and seems to reign 
supreme in loneliness : this is of the heart as 
well as of the eye ! — Look also at his image 

20 of a thaw, and prophesied fall of the " Auld 
Brig :" 

When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains 
Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains ; 

1. Lift. Sky. 

4. Ae. One. 

6. Burns, etc. Streams with snowy wreaths choked up. 

8. Bocked. Vomited. 

20. Auld Brig. See Burns's poem, "The Brigs of Ayr," an imaginary 
dialogue between the old and the new bridges across the Ayr, in the 
town of Ayr. 



BURNS. 39 

When from the hills where springs the brawl- 
ing Coil , 
Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil, 
Or where the Greenock winds his moorland 

course, 5 

Or haunted Garpal* draws his feeble source, 
Arous'd by blust'ring wind and spotting 

thowes, 
In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo roives ; 
While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat, 10 
Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a 9 to the 

gate ; 
And from Glenbuck down to the Rottenkey, 
Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd tumbling sea ; 
Then down ye'll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise ! i 5 
And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring 
skies. 

The , last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of 
that Deluge ! The welkin has, as it were, 
bent down with its weight; the * " gumlie 20 
jaups " and the " pouring skies " are mingled 

*Fabulosus Hydaspes! — Note by Carlyle. See Horace. Odes I. 22. 

8. Thowes. Thaws. , 

9. Snaiv-broo. Literally snow broth, i. «.. melted snow. 
10. Speat. Flood. 

12. Glenbuck. The source of the river 

Rottenkey. A small landing place near the mouth of the river. 

15. Deil nor ye never rise. In the devil's name, may you never rise. 
The Old Bridge, which is supposed to he speaking, despises the new- 
fangled architecture of its more modern neighbor. 

16. Gumlie jaups. Muddy waves or splashes. 

18. Pou*si?i. Nicolas Poussin, a noted French historical and land- 
scape painter (1594 - 1665). 



40 BURNS. 

together ; it is a world of rain and ruin. — 
In respect of mere clearness and minute 
fidelity, the "Farmer's" commendation of 
his "Auld Mare," in plough or in cart, may 

5 vie with Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops, or 
yoking of Priam's Chariot. Nor have we 
forgotten stout "Burn-the-Wind " and his 
brawny customers, inspired by " Scotch 
Drink :" but it is needless to multiply exam- 

10 pies. One other trait of a much finer sort 
we select from multitudes of such among his 
" Songs." It gives, in a single line, to the 
saddest feeling the saddest environment and 
local habitation : 

15 The pale moon is setting beyond the white 
wave, 
And time is setting wi* me, 0; 
Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell ! 
I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O. 

20 20. This clearness of sight we have called 
the foundation of all talent ; for in fact, unless 

3. ''Farmer's" . . . " Auld Mare." Referring to Burns's touch- 
ing verses, "The Auld Fanner's New Year Morning Salutation to his 

Auld Mare Maggie." 

5. Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops. The smithy of the Cyclops was 
the spot, Mt. Etna or elsewhere, at which these one-eyed Titans forged 
Zeus's thunderbolts; but Carlyle perhaps refers to the story of Odys- 
seus and Polyphemus, the sheep-raising and man-eating giant, in the 
ninth book of the Odyssey. 

6. For the yoking of Priam's chariot, see the Iliad, Book xxi V. 

7. " Bur n-the- Wind." "Burnewin" (Burn-the-wind) is a vivid 
Scotch expression for " blacksmith." 



^0 



BURNS. 41 

we see our object, how shall we know how to 
place or prize it, in our understanding, our 
imagination, our affections? Yet, it is not 
in itself, perhaps, a very high excellence ; 
but capable of being united indifferently 
with the strongest, or with ordinary power. 
Homer, surpasses all men in this quality : but 
strangely enough, at no great distance below 
him are Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, 
in truth, to what is called a lively mind ; and 
gives no sure indication of the higher endow- 
ments that may exist along with it. In all 
the three cases we have mentioned, it is 
combined with great garrulity ; their descrip- 
tions are detailed, ample and lovingly exact ; 
Homer's lire bursts through, from time to 
time, as if by accident ; but Defoe and Rich- 
ardson have no fire. Burns, again, is not 
more distinguished by the clearness than by 
the impetuous force of his conceptions. Of 
the strength, the piercing emphasis with 
which he thought, his emphasis of expres- 
sion may give a humble but the readiest 
proof. Who ever uttered sharper sayings 
than his ; words more memorable, now by 

25 

their burning vehemence, now by their cool 

13. Samuel Richardson. A popular novelist of hn day (I689-17G1) ; 
author of " Pamela," " Clarissa," " Harlowe," and " Sir Charles 
Grandison." 



42 . BURNS. 

vigor and laconic pith? A single phrase 
depicts a whole subject, a whole scene. 
We hear of "a gentleman that derived his 
patent of nobility direct from Almighty 

5 God." Our Scottish forefathers in the bat- 
tle-field struggled forward " red-wat-shod:" 
in this one word a full vision of horror and 
carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for 
Art ! 

10 21. In fact, one of the leading features in 
the mind of Burns is this vigor of his strictly 
intellectual perceptions. A resolute force is 
ever visible in his judgments, and in his feel- 
ings and volitions. Professor Stewart says 

15 of him, with some surprise : "All the facul- 
ties of Burns's mind were, as far as I could 
judge, equally vigorous ; and his predilection 
for poetry was rather the result of his own 
enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of 

20 a genius exclusively adapted to that species 
of composition. From his conversation I 
should have pronounced him to be fitted to 
excel in whatever walk of ambition he had 
chosen to exert his abilities." But this, if we 

25 mistake not, is at all times the very essence 

6. Red-tcat-shod. " Red-wet-shod," with blood-stained feet. 

14. Professor Steu-art. Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), a celebrated Scot- 
tish philosopher. 



BURNS. 43 

of a truly poetical endowment. Poetry, 
except in such cases as that of Keats, where 
the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin 
sensibility, and a certain vague random tune- 
fulness of nature, is no separate faculty, no s 
organ which can be superadded to the rest, or 
disjoined from them ; but rather the result of 
their general harmony and completion. The 
feelings, the gifts that exist in the Poet are 
those that exist, with more or less develop- 10 
ment, in every human soul : the imagination, 
which shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the 
same faculty, weaker in degree, which called 
that picture into being. How does the Poet 
speak to men, with power, but by- being still is 
more a man than they? Shakespeare, it has 
been well observed, in the planning and com- 
pleting of his tragedies, has shown an Under- 
standing, were it nothing more, which might 
have governed states, or indited a " Novum 20 
Qrganum." What Burns's force of under- 
standing may have been, we have less means 
of judging : it had to dwell among the 

2. Keats, John Keats (1795-1821), a celebrated English poet, author 
of 'Eve of St. Agnes," etc. His poetry, evidently, did not please Carlyle. 

12 The Hell of Dante. Hell is vividly pictured in Dante's " Inferno,*' 
the first part of his " Divine Comedy." 

20. " Novum Organum:'' The chief philosophic work of Francis 
Bacon. 



44 BURNS. 

humblest objects ; never saw Philosophy ; 
never rose, except by natural effort and for 
short intervals, into the region of great 
ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient indication, if 
5 no proof sufficient, remains for us in his 
works ; we discern the brawny movements 
of a gigantic though untutored strength ; 
and can understand how, in conversation 
his quick sure insight into men and things 

10 may, as aught else about him, have amazed 
the best thinkers of his time and country. 

22. But, unless we mistake, the intellec- 
tual ffift of Burns is fine as well as strong. 
The more delicate relations of things could 

15 not well have escaped his eye, for they were 
intimately present to his heart. The. logic 
of the senate and the forum is indispensable, 
but not all-sufficient ; nay, perhaps the highest 
Truth is that which will the most certainly 

20 elude it. For this logic works by words, 
and "the highest," it has been said, "cannot 
be expressed in words." We are not without 
tokens of an openness for this higher truth 
also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for 

25 it, having existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it 
will be remembered, " wonders," in the pass- 
age above quoted, that Burns had formed 



BURNS. 45 

some distinct conception of the "doctrine of 
association. " We rather think that far 
subtler things than the doctrine of associa- 
tion had from of old been familiar to him. 
Here for instance : 5 

23. "We know nothing," thus writes he, 
"or next to nothing, of the structure of 
our souls, so we cannot account for those 
seeming caprices in them, that one should 
be particularly pleased with this thing, or 10 
struck with that, which, on minds of a differ- 
ent cast, makes no extraordinary impression. 
I have some favorite flowers in spring, among 
which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, 
the foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the bud- 15 
ding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I 
view and hang over with particular delight. 
I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the 
curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing 
cadence of a troop of gray plover in an 20 
autumnal morning, without feeling an ele- 
vation of the soul like the enthusiasm of 
devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear 
friend, to what can this be owing? Are we 
a piece of machinery,. which, like the iEolian25 
harp, passive, takes the impression of the 
passing accident ; or do these workings argue 



46 BURNS. 

something within us above the trodden clod ? 
I own myself partial to such proofs of those 
awful and important realities : a God that 
made all things, man's immaterial and im- 

5 mortal nature, and a world of weal or woe 
beyond death and the grave." 

24. Force and fineness of understanding 
are often spoken of as something different 
from general force and fineness of nature, as 

io something partly independent of them. The 
necessities of language so require it ; but in 
truth these qualities are not distinct and inde- 
pendent : except in special cases, and from 
special causes, they ever go together. A 

15 man of strong understanding is generally 
a man of strong character ; neither is deli- 
cacy in the one kind often divided from 
delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, 
is ignorant that in thp poetry of Burns keen- 

2oness of insight keeps pace with keenness of 
feeling ; that his light is not more pervading 
than his warmth. He is a man of the most 
impassioned temper : with passions not strong 
only, but noble, and of the sort in which great 

25 virtues and great poems take their rise. It 
is reverence, it is love towards all Nature 
that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its. 



BURNS. 47 

beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent 
in its praise. There is a true old saying, 
that "Love furthers knowledge :" but above 
all it is the living essence of that knowledge 
which makes poets : the first principle of its 5 
existence, increase, activity. Of Burns's 
fervid affection, his generous all-embracing 
Love, we have spoken already, as of the 
grand distinction of his nature, seen equally 
in word and deed, in his Life and in hisio 
Writings. It were easy to multiply exam- 
ples. Not man only, but all that environs 
man in the material and moral universe, is 
lovely in his sight: "the hoary hawthorn," 
the "troop of gray plover," the "solitary 15 
curlew," all are dear to him ; all live in this 
Earth along with him, and to all he is knit 
as in mysterious brotherhood. How touch- 
ing is it, for instance, that, amidst the gloom 
of personal misery, brooding over the wintry 20 
desolation without him and within him, he 
thinks of the " ourie cattle " and " silly sheep," 
and their sufferings in the pitiless storm ! 

I thought me on the ourie cattle, 

Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 25 

24. From "A Winter Night." 

25. Ourie. Shivering or drooping. 
Brattle. Ace or attack. 



48 BURNS. 

O wintry war, 
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur. 
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 
That in the merry months o' spring 
5 Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee ? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 

And close thy ee ? 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its "ragged 
10 roof and chinky wall," has a heart to pity 
even these ! This is worth several homilies 
on Mercy ; for it is the voice of Mercy her- 
self. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy; his 
soul rushes forth into all realms of being ; 
15 nothing that has existence can be indifferent 
to him. The very Devil he cannot hate with 
right orthodoxy : 

But fare you weel, auld Xickie-ben ; 
O, wad ye tak a thought and men' ! 
20 Ye aiblins might, — I dinna ken, — 
Still hae a stake ; 



2. Lairing. Waiding, sinking. 
Sprattle. Scramble. 

3. Scaur Cliff. 

4. Ilk. Every. 

7. Chittering. Shivering, trembling. * 

18 The closing stanza of the " Address to the Deil." 
Nickie. Old Nick. 

19. Wad. Would. 
Men" 1 . Mend 

20. Aiblins Perhaps. 
Di7ina ken. Do not know. 

21. Stake. Chance (?). 



BURNS. 49 

I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Even for your sake ! 

w He is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. 
Slop ; " and is cursed and damned already." — 
"I am sorry for it," quoth my uncle Toby! 5 
— a Poet without Love were a physical and 
metaphysical impossiblility . 

25. But has it not been said, in contra- 
diction to this principle, that "Indignation 
makes verses?" It has been so said, and isio 
true enough : but the contradiction is appar- 
ent, not real. The Indignation which makes 
verses is, properly speaking, an inverted 
Love ; the love of some right, some worth, 
some goodness, belonging to ourselves oris 
others, w T hich has been injured, and wdiich 
this tempestuous feeling issues forth to 
defend and avenge. No selfish fury of 
heart, existing there as a primary feeling, 
and without its opposite, ever produced 20 
much Poetry : otherwise, we suppose, the 
Tiger were the most musical of all our chor- 
isters. Johnson said, he loved a good hater ; 
by which he must have meant, not so much 

1. Wae. Sad, sorrowful. 

4-5. Dr. Slop. Uncle Toby. Characters in Sterne's "Tristram 
Shandy." 

9. Indignation makes verses. Facit indignatio versus.-— Juvenal. 



50 BURNS. 

one that hated violently, as one that hated 
wisely ; hated baseness from love of noble- 
ness. However, in spite of Johnson's para- 
dox, tolerable enough for once in speech, but 

5 which need not have been so often adopted in 
print since then, we rather believe that good 
men deal sparingly in hatred, either wise 
or unwise : nay that a "good " hater is still a 
desideratum in this world. The Devil, at 

10 least, who passes for the chief and best 
of that class, is said to be nowise an ami- 
able character. 

26. Of the verses which Indignation 
makes, Burns has also given us specimens : 

15 and among the best that were ever given. 
Who will forget his " Dweller in yon Dun- 
geon dark ; " a piece that might have been 
chanted by the Furies of iEschylus? The 
secrets of the. Infernal Pit are. laid bare; a 

20 boundless, baleful "darkness visible;" and 
streaks of hell-tire quivering madly in its 
black, haggard bosom ! 



3. Johnson. Dr SamuelJohnson (1709-1784). Boswell, in his "Life 
of Johnson," reports him as saying, "Sir, I like a good hater." 

18. Furies. In Greek mythology, female deities, avengers of ini- 
quity. ^Eschylus, the greatest of the Greek tragic poets, introduced 
a chorus of Furies in the £umenides, one of his tragedies. 

20. Darkness visible. "Paradise Lost," I., 62. 



BURNS. 51 

Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 

Hangman of Creation, mark! 

Who in widow's weeds appears, 

Laden with unhonored years, 

Noosing with care a bursting purse, *> 

Baited with many a deadly curse ! 

27. Why should we speak of" Scots wha 
hae wi' Wallace bled" ; since all know of it, 
from the king to the meanest of his subjects ? 
This dithyrambic was composed on horse- 10 
back ; in riding in the middle of tempests, 
over the wildest Galloway *moor, in com- 
pany with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the 
poet's looks forbore to speak — judiciously 
enough, for a man composing "Bruce's 18 
Address " might be unsafe to trifle with. 
Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, 
as he formed it, through the soul of Burns : 
but to the external ear, it should be sung 
with the throat of the whirlwind. So long 20 
as there is warm blood in the heart of 
Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce 
thrills under this war-ode ; the best, we 



1. The opening of Burns's bitter " Ode, Sacred to the Memory of 
Mrs. Oswald." It will perhaps require a second reading to catch the 
6ense. 

3. Who refers to the object of mark : mark (her) who. 

6. Noosing is tying lightly, or. perhaps, nursing. The lady addressed 
was, as the ode goes on to show, avaricious to the last degree. 



52 BURNS. 

believe, that was ever written by any pen. 
28. Another wild, stormful Song that 
dwells in our ear and mind with a strange 
tenacity, is " Macpherson's Farewell." Per- 
5 haps there is something in the tradition itself 
that cooperates. For was not this grim Celt, 
this shaggy Northland Cacus, that "lived a 
live of sturt and strife, and died by treach- 
erie," — was not he too one of the Nimrods 

10 and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of 
his own remote .misty glens, for want of a 
clearer and wider one? Nay, was there not 
a touch of grace given him? A fibre of love 
and softness, of poetry itself, must have lived 

15 in his savage heart : for he composed that air 
the night before his execution ; on the wings 
of that poor melody his better soul would 
soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the 
ignominy and despair, which, like an ava- 

20 lanche, was hurling him to the abyss ! Here 



4. Macpherson's Fare>r(U. James Macpherson was a noted Scotch- 
freebooter, a man of very unusual physical strength and a skilful per- 
former on the violin. He was finally captured, tried, and condemned 
to death in the year 1700. While in prison awaiting execution, he com- 
posed a farewell song. Under the gallows lie played the tune on his 
violin, and then offered the instrument to any friend who would come 
forward and accept it at his hands. No one offering, he. angrily broke 
the violin on his knee and threw away the pieces. Then he submitted to 
his fate. 

7. Cacus. A giant robber of the Aventine, whom Hercules slew. 

8. Sturt. Struggle. 



BURNS. 53 

also, as at Thebes, and in Pelops' line, was 
material Fate matched against man's Free- 
will ; matched in bitterest though obscure 
duel ; and the ethereal soul sank not, even 
in its blindness, without a cry which has sur-s 
vived it. But who, except Burns, could have 
given words to such a soul ; words that we 
never listen to without a strange half-bar- 
barous, half-poetic fellow-feeling? 

Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 10 

Sae daunting ly gaed he; 
He play'd a spring and danced it round, 

Below the gallows-tree. 

29. Under a lighter disguise, the same 
principle of Love, which we have recognized 15 
as the great characteristic of Burns, and of 
all true poets, occasionally manifests itself in 
the shape of Humor. Everywhere, indeed, 
in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of 
mirth rolls through the mind of Burns ; he 20 
rises to the high, and stoops to the low, and 
is brother and playmate to all Nature. We 
speak not of his bold and often irresistible 
faculty of caricature ; for this is Drollery 

1. Thebes, and in Pelops" 1 line. An allusion to the Greek tragedies, 
the most popular subjects of which were (Edipus, King of Thebes, 
Pelops, and the various heroes of the Trojan war. 

2. Material Fate. Predestination, destiny. 



54 BURNS. 

rather than Humor : but a much tenderer 
sportfulness dwells in him ; and comes forth 
here and there, in evanescent and beautiful 
touches; as in his "Address to the Mouse," 
6 or the "Farmer's Mare," or in his "Elegy on 
poor Mailie," which last may be reckoned his 
happiest effort of this kind. In these pieces 
there are traits of a Humor as fine as that of 
Sterne ; yet altogether different, original, 
10 peculiar, — the Humor of Burns. 

IV. 

30. Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, 
and many other kindred qualities of Burns's 
Poetry, much more might be said; but now, 

15 with these poor outlines of a sketch, we must 
prepare to quit this part of our subject. To 
speak of his individual Writings, adequately 
and with any detail, would lead us far beyond 
our limits. As already hinted, we can look 

20 on but few of these pieces as, in strict criti- 
cal language, deserving the name of Poems : 
they are rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, 
rhymed sense ; yet seldom essentially melo- 
dious, aerial, poetical. "Tarn o' Shanter" 

25 itself, which enjoys so high a favor, does not 

9. Sterne. Laurence Sterne. A celebrated English novelist (1713- 
1768 , author of "Tristram Shandy," etc. 



BURNS. 55 

appear to us at all decisively to come under 
this last category. It is not so much a poem, 
as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; the heart 
and body of the story still lies hard and dead. 
He has not gone back, much less carried us 5 
back, into that dark, earnest, wondering age, 
when the tradition was believed, and when it 
took its rise ; he does not attempt, by any 
new modeling of his supernatural ware, to 
strike anew that deep mysterious chord ofio 
human nature, which once responded to such 
things ; and which lives in us too, and will 
forever live, though silent now, or vibrating 
with far other notes, and to far different 
issues. Our German readers will understand 15 
us, when we say, that he is not the Tieck but 
the Musaus of this tale. Externally it is all 
green and living ; yet look closer, it is no 
firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. The 
piece does not properly, cohere : the strange 20 
chasm which yawns in our incredulous imag- 
inations between the Ayr public-house and 
the gate of Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, 

16. Tierk. Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), a German poet and critic, 
spoken of elsewhere by Carlyle as " a true poet, a poet born as well 

as made." 

17. Musaus. Johann Carl August Musaus (173,-1787). His chief work 
was "Folk Tales of the Germans." Carlyle says: " He attempts not to 
deal with the deeper feelings of the heart. . . . Musaus is, in fact, no 
poet." 



56 BURNS. 

nay the idea of such a bridge is laughed 
at ; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure 
becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria, 
or many-colored spectrum painted on ale- 

5 vapors, and the Farce alone has any reality. 
We do not say that Burns should have made 
much more of this tradition ; Ave rather think 
that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much 
was to be made of it. Neither are we blind 

10 to the deep, varied, genial power displayed 
in what he has actually accomplished ; but 
we find far more "Shakespearean" qualities, 
as these of "Tarn o' Shanter" have been 
fondly named, in many of his other pieces ; 

15 nay we incline to believe that this latter 
might have been written, all but quite as 
well, by a man who, in place of genius, had 
only possessed talent. 

31. Perhaps we may venture to say, that 

20 the most strictly poetical of all his " poems" 
is one which does not appear in Currie's 
Edition ; but has been often printed before 

^ and since, under the humble title of " The 
Jolly Beggars." The subject truly is among 

25 the lowest in nature; but it only the more 
shows our Poet's gift in raising- it into the 
domain of Art. To our minds, this piece 



BURNS. 57 

seems thoroughly compacted ; melted to- 
gether, refined ; and poured forth in one 
flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, 
airy, soft of movement ; yet sharp and pre- 
cise in its details ; every face is a portrait : 5 
that " raucle carlin," that "wee Apollo," that 
" Son of Mars," are Scottish, yet ideal ; the 
scene is at once a dream, and the very Rag- 
castle of "Poosie Nansie." Farther, it seems 
in a considerable degree complete, a real 10 
self-supporting Whole, which is the highest 
merit in a poem. The blanket of the Night 
is drawn asunder for a moment; in full, 
ruddy, flaming light, these rough tatterde- 
malions are seen in their boisterous revel ; 15 
for the strong pulse of Life vindicates its 
right to gladness even here ; and when the 
curtain closes, we prolong the action, with- 
out effort ; the next day as the last, our 
" Caird " and our " Balladmonger" are sing- 20 
ing and soldiering ; their " brats and callets" 
are hawking, begging, cheating ; and some 
other night, in new combinations, they will 
wring from Fate another hour of wassail and 
good cheer. Apart from the universal sym- 25 
pathy with man which this again bespeaks in 
Burns, a genuine inspiration and no incon- 



58 BURNS. 

siderahle technical talent are manifested here. 
There is the fidelity, humor, warm life and 
accurate painting and grouping of some 
Terriers, for whom hostlers and carousing 
5 peasants are not without significance. It 
would be strange, doubtless, to call this the 
best of Burns's writings : we mean to say 
only, that it seems to us the most perfect 
of its kind, as a piece of poetical composi- 
lotion, strictly so called. In the "Beggars' 
Opera," in the "Beggars' Bush," as other 
critics have already remarked, there is 
nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals 
this " Cantata ;" nothing, as we think, which 
is comes within many degrees of it. 

32. But by far the most finished, com- 
plete and truly inspired pieces of Burns 
are without dispute, to be found among his 
"Songs." It is here that, although through 
20 a small aperture, his light shines with least 
obstruction ; in its highest beauty and pure 
sunny clearness. The reason may be, that 
Song is a brief simple species of composition ; 
and requires nothing so much for its perfec- 
tion as genuine poetic feeling, genuine music 

4. Tenters. A celebrated Flemish painter (1582-1649). 

11. " Beggars Opera," " Beggars BmsA." Comic operas, very popular 
in England in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. 



BURNS. 59 

of heart. Yet the Song has its rules equally 
with the Tragedy ; rules which in most cases 
are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not so 
much as felt. We might write a long essav 
on the Songs of Burns ; which we reckon by 5 
far the best that Britain has yet produced : 
for indeed, since the era of Queen Eliza- 
beth, we know not that, by any other hand, 
aught truly worth attention has been accom- 
plished in this department. True, we have 10 
songs enough " by persons of quality ; " we 
have tawdry, hollow, wine-bred madigrals ; 
many a rhymed speech " in the flowing and 
watery vein of Ossorious the Portugal 
Bishop," rich in sonorous words, and, for 15 
moral, dashed perhaps with some tint of a 
sentimental sensuality ; all which many per- 
sons cease not from endeavoring to sing ; 
though for most part, we fear, the music 
is but from the throat outwards, or at best 20 
from some region far enough short of the 
Soul; not in which, but in a certain inane 
Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some vapor- 
ous debateable-land on the outskirts of the 



14. Ossorius the Portugal Bishop. Geronymo Osorio (1506-1586;. 
"The Cicero of Portugal, " born at Lisbon, and educated at Salam- 
anca. His "Hist ry of P^manuel I." in Latin, is famous for the ease 
and finish of its Latin style. 



60 BURNS. 

Nervous System, most of such madrigals and 
rhymed speeches seem to have originated. 

33. With the songs of Burns we must not 
name these things. Independently of the 
5 clear, manly, heartfelt sentiment that ever 
pervades his poetry, his Songs are honest in 
another point of view : in form, as well as in 
spirit. They do not affect to be set to music, 
but they actually and in themselves are music ; 

io they, have received their life, and fashioned 
themselves together, in the medium of Har- 
mony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the 
sea. The story, the feeling, is not detailed, 
but suggested ; not said, or spouted, in rhet- 

i5orical completeness and coherence ; hut sung, 
in litful gushes, in glowing hints, in fan- 
tastic breaks, in warblings not of the voice 
only, but of the whole mind. We consider 
this to be the essence of a song : and that no 

20 songs since the little careless catches, arid as 
it were drops of song, which Shakespeare has 
here and there sprinkled over his plays, fulfil 
this condition in nearly the same degree as 
most of Burns's do. Such grace and truth 

25 of external movement, too, presupposes in 

12. Venus. Venus or "foam-born." The celebrated painting of 
Apelles represented her as "rising" from the sea, wringing her 
golden tresses on her shoulders. 



BURNS. 61 

general a corresponding force and truth of 
sentiment and inward meaning. The Songs 
of Burns are not more perfect in the former 
quality than in the latter. With what tender- 
ness he sings, yet with what vehemence ands 
entireness ! There is a piercing wail in his 
sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy; he 
burns with the sternest ire, or laughs with 
the loudest or slyest mirth ; and yet he is 
sweet and soft, "sweet as the smile whenio 
fond lovers meet, and soft as their parting 
tear." If we farther take into account the 
immense variety of his subjects ; how, from 
the loud flowing revel in M Willie brew'd a 
Peck o' Maut," to the still, rapt enthusiasm 15 
of sadness for " Mary in Heaven ; " from the 
glad kind greeting of " Auld Langsyne," or 
the comic archness of " Duncan Gray," to the 
fire-eyed fury of " Scots wha' hae wi' Wallace 
bled," he has found a tone and words for 20 
every mood of man's heart, — it will seem 
a small praise if we rank him as the first of 
of all our Song-writers ; for we know not 
where to find one worthy of being second 
to him. - 25 

34. It is on his Songs, as we believe, 
that Burns's chief influence as an author will 



62 BURNS. 

ultimately be found to depend ; nor, if our 
Fletcher's aphorism is true, shall we account 
this a small influence. " Let me make the 
songs of a people," said he, "and you shall 
5 make its laws." Surely, if ever any Poet 
might have equalled himself with Legislators 
on this ground, it was Burns. His Songs 
are already part of the mother-tongue, not 
of Scotland only, but of Britain, and of the 

10 millions that in all ends of the earth speak 
a British language. In hut and hall, as the 
heart unfolds itself in many-colored joy and 
woe of existence, the name, the voice of that 
joy and that woe, is the name and voice which 

is Burns has given them. Strictly speaking, 
perhaps no British man has so deeply effected 
the thoughts and feelings of so many men, 
as this solitary and altogether private indi- 
vidual, with means apparently the humblest. 

20 35. In another point of view, moreover, 
we incline to think that Burns's influence 
may have been considerable : we mean as 
exerted specially on the Literature of his 
country, at least on the Literature of Scot- 

25 land. Among the great changes which 
British, particularly Scottish literature has 

2. Fletcher's Aphorism. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716). 
For his participation in the Monmouth Rebellion see Macauley's 
" History." 



BURNS. 63 

undergone since that period, one of the 
greatest will be found to consist in its 
remarkable increase of nationality. Even 
the English writers, most popular in Burns's 
time, were little distinguished for their liter- 5 
ary patriotism, in this its best sense. A 
certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in 
good measure, taken place of the old insular 
home-feeling ; literature was, as it were, 
without any local environment; was not 10 
nourished by the affections which spring 
from a native soil. Our Grays and Glovers 
seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; the 
thing written bears no mark of place ; it is 
not written so much for Englishmen, as for 15 
men ; or rather, which is the inevitable result 
of this, for certain Generalizations which 
philosophy termed men. Goldsmith is an 
exception : not so Johnson ; the scene of his 
"Rambler" is little more English than that 20 
of his " Rasselas." 

12. Our Grays and Glovers. Richard Glover (1712-1785), author of 
"Leonidas," " Hosier's Ghost," etc. 

Gray. Thomas Gray, author of the " Elegy in a Country Church- 
yard." 

18. Goldsmith. Oliver Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" and "Trav- 
eller," mark the beginning of the reaction from the affected style of 
Pope and his followers. 

20. '■'■Rambler'' 1 A periodical on the plan of the "Spectator," pub- 
lished by Dr. Johnson in 1750-1752.* 

21. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. Is a romance, the scene of which 
is nominally laid in Abyssinia. The tone of the story, however, is dis- 
tinctively English. 



64 BURNS. 

36. But if such was, in some degree, the 
case with England, it was, in the highest 
degree, the case with Scotland. In fact, 
our Scottish literature had, at that period, 

sa very singular aspect; unexampled, so far 
as we know, except perhaps at Geneva, 
where the same state of matters appears 
still to continue. For a long period after 
Scotland became British, we had no litera- 

loture: at the date when Addison and Steele 
were writing their " Spectators," our good 
John Boston was writing, with the noblest 
intent, but alike in defiance of grammar and 
philosophy, his " Fourfold State of Man." 

15 Then came the schisms in our National 
Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body 
Politic ; Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, 
with gall enough in both cases, seemed to 
have blotted out the intellect of the country : 

20 however, it was only obscured, not oblit- 
erated. Lord Karnes made nearly the first 

6. Geneva. Switzerland has naturally been much under the influ- 
ence of French, German, and Italian culture, and has produced little in 
literature that is characteristic and original. 

12. Good John Boston. Thomas Boston (1676-1732). A Scottish divine. 

15. Schisms in our National Church. Dissensions in the Scottish 
Church during the eighteenth century. 

16. Fiercer schisms in our Body Politic. Between the Jacobites, the 
partisans of the Stuarts, and the partisans of the Orange, and later the 
Hanoverian, dynasty. 

21. Karnes. Lord Karnes, author of the " Elements of Criticism," a 
learned work on aesthetics. 



BURNS. 65 

attempt at writing English ; and ere long, 
Hume, Robertson, Smith, and a whole host 
of followers, attracted hither the eyes of all 
Europe. And yet in this brilliant resusci- 
tation of our " fervid genius," there was s 
nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous ; 
except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of 
intellect, which we sometimes claim, and are 
sometimes upbraided with, as a characteristic 
of our nation. It is curious to remark thatio 
Scotland, so full of writers, had no Scottish 
culture, nor indeed any English : our culture 
was almost exclusively French. It was by 
studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteaux and 
Boileau, that Karnes had trained himself to is 
be a critic and philosopher ; it was the light 
of Montesquieu and Mably that guided Rob- 
ertson in his political speculations ; Quesnay's 

2. Hume (David). Historian of England. 

Robertson (William). Author of the "History of the Emperor 
Charles V.," and a "History of Scotland." 

Smith (Adam). Called the founder of modern political economy, 
author of the "Wealth of Nations." 

14. Racine. The great French tragic poet. 

Voltaire. The French critic, satirist, poet, and sceptic. 
Batteaux. A less popular French writer on aesthetics, which was 
at that time a favorite subject of study in Scotland. 

15. Boileau. A famous French poet and critic. 

17. Montesquieu. A noted French philosophical writer. 
Mably. Another important French publicist. 

18. Qxiesnay. A French political economist. 



6(3 BURNS. 

lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. 
Hume was too rich a man to borrow ; and 
perhaps he reacted on the French more than 
he was acted on by them : but neither had 
5 he aught to do with Scotland; Edinburgh, 
equally with La Fleehe, was but the lodging 
and laboratory, in which he not so much 
morally lived, as metaphysically investigated. 
Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers 

10 so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally 
destitute, to all appearance, of any patriotic 
affection, nay of any human affection what- 
ever. The French wits of the period were 
as unpatriotic : but their general deficiency 

is in moral principle, not to say their avowed 
sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, strictly 
so called, render this accountable enough. 
We hope, there is a patriotism founded on 
something better than prejudice ; that our 

20 county may be dear to us, without injury 
to our philosophy ; that in loving and justly 
prizing all other lands, we may prize justly, 
and yet love before all others, our own stern 
Motherland, and the venerable Structure of 

25 social and moral Life, which Mind has 
through long ages been building up for us 

6. La Fleehe On the Loire, where Hume spent some years while 
engaged in philosophical writing. 



BURNS. 67 

there. Surely there is nourishment for the 
better part of man's heart in all this : surely 
the roots, that have fixed themselves in the 
very core of man's being, may be so cul- 
tivated as to grow up not into briers, but 5 
into roses, in the field of his life ! Our 
Scottish sages have no such propensities : 
the field of their life shows neither briers 
nor roses ; but only a flat, continuous thrash- 
ing-floor for Logic, wheron all questions, from 10 
the " Doctrine of Rent " to the " Natural His- 
tory of Religion, "are thrashed and sifted with 
the same mechanical impartiality ! 

37. With Sir Walter Scott at the head of 
our literature, it cannot be denied that much 15 
of this evil is past, or rapidly passing away : 
our chief literary men, whatever other faults 
they may have, no longer live among us like 
a French Colony, or some knot of Propa- 
ganda Missionaries; but like natural-born 20 
subjects of the soil, partaking and sympa- 
thizing in all our attachments, humors and 
habits. Our literature no longer grows in 
water, but in mould, and with the true racy 
virtues of the soil and climate. How much 25 
of this change may be due to Burns, or to 

19. Propaganda Missionaries. Missionaries under the supervision 
of the Catholic Propaganda, for the propagation of the faith. 



68 BURNS. 

any other individual, it might be difficult to 
estimate. Direct literary imitation of Burns 
was not to be looked for. But his example, 
in the fearless adoption of domestic subjects, 
5 could not but operate from afar ; and cer- 
tainly in no heart did the love of country 
ever burn with a warmer glow than in that 
of Burns : "a tide of Scottish prejudice," as 
he modestly calls this deep and generous feel- 

ioing, "had been poured along his veins; and 
he felt that it would boil there till the flood- 
gates shut in eternal rest." It seemed to him, 
as if lie could do so little for his country, 
and yet would so gladly have done all. One 

15 small province stood open for him, — that of 
Scottish Song ; and how eagerly he entered 
on it, how devotedly he labored there ! In 
his toilsome journeyings, this object never 
quits him ; it is the little happy-valley of his 

20 careworn heart. In the gloom of his own 
affliction, he eagerly searches after some 
lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices to 
snatch one other name from the oblivion that 
was covering it ! These were early feelings, 

25 and they abode with him to the end : 

A wish (I mind its power) , 
A wish, that to my latest hour 



BURNS. 69 

Will strongly heave my breast, — 
That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
Some useful plan or book could make, 
Or sing a song at least. 

The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 5 

Amang the bearded bear, 
I turn'd my weeding-clips aside, 

And spared the symbol dear. 

V. 

38. But to leave the mere literary char- 
acter of Burns, which has already detained 10 
us too long. Far more interesting than any 
of his written works, as it appears to us, are 
his acted ones : the Life he willed and was 
fated to lead among his fellow-men. These 
Poems are but like little rhymed fragments 15 
scattered here and there in the grand 
unrhymed Romance of his earthly exist- 
ence ; and it is only when intercalated in 
this at their proper places, that they attain 
their full measure of significance. And this, 20 
too, alas, was but a fragment! The plan of 
a mighty edifice had been sketched ; some 
columns, porticos, firm masses of building, 
stand completed ; the rest more or less 
clearly indicated ; with many a far-stretching 25 
tendency, which only studious and friendly 



70 BURNS. 

eyes can now trace towards the purposed 
termination. For the work is broken off in 
the middle, almost in the beginning; and 
rises among us, beautiful and sad, at once 

5 unfinished and a ruin! If charitable judg- 
ment was necessary in estimating his Poems, 
and justice required that the aim and the 
manifest power to fulfil it must often be 
accepted for the fulfilment ; much more is 

10 this the case in regard to his Life, the sum 
and result of all his endeavors, where his 
difficulties came upon him not in detail only, 
but in mass ; and so much has been left unac- 
complished, nay was mistaken, and altogether 

15 marred. 

39. Properly speaking, there is but one 
era in the life of Burns, and that the earliest. 
We have not youth and manhood, but only 
youth : for, to the end, we discern no decisive 

20 change in the complexion of his character; in 
his thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it w T ere, 
in youth. With all that resoluteness of judg- 
ment, that penetrating insight, and singular 
maturity of intellectual power, exhibited in 

25 his writings, he never attains to any clear- 
ness regarding himself; to the last, he never 
ascertains his peculiar aim, even with such 



BURNS. 71 

distinctness as is common among ordinary 
men ; and therefore never can pursue it with 
that singleness of will, which insures success 
and some contentment to such men. To the 
last, he wavers between two purposes : glory- » 
ing in his talent, like a true poet, he yet can- 
not consent to make this his chief and sole 
glory, and to follow it as the one thing need- 
ful, through poverty or riches, through good 
or evil report. Another far meaner ambition 10 
still cleaves to him: he must dream and 
struggle about a certain "Rock of Indepen- 

CO 

dence ;" which, natural and even admirable 
as it might be, was still but a warring with 
the world, on the comparatively insignificant ^ 
ground of his being more completely or less 
completely supplied with money than others ; 
of his standing at a higher or at a lower alti- 
tude in general estimation than others. For 
the world still appears to him, as to the 20 
young, in borrowed colors : he expects from 
it what it cannot give to any man ; seeks for 
contentment, not within himself, in action 
and wise effort, but from without, in the 
kindness of circumstances, in love, friend- 25 
ship, honor, pecuniary ease. He would be 
happy, not actively and in himself, but pas- 



72 BURNS. 

sively and from some ideal cornucopia of 
Enjoyments, not earned by his own labor, 
but showered on him by the beneficence of 
Destiny. Thus, like a young man, he can- 
5 not gird himself up for any worthy well-cal- 
culated goal, but swerves to and fro, between 
passionate hope and remorseful disappoint- 
ment : rushing onwards with a deep tempes- 
tuous force ; he surmounts or breaks asunder 
10 many a barrier; travels, nay advances far, 
but advancing, only under uncertain guid- 
ance, is ever and anon turned from his path ; 
and to the last cannot reach the only true 
happiness of a man, that of clear decided 
is Activity in the sphere for which, by nature 
and circumstances, he has been fitted and 
appointed. 

40. We do not say these things in dis- 
praise of Burns ; nay, perhaps, they but inter- 
so est us the more in his favor. This blessing 
is not given soonest to the best ; but rather, 
it is often the greatest minds that are latest in 
obtaining it ; for where most is to be devel- 
oped, most time may be required to develop 
25 it. A complex condition had been assigned 
him from without ; as complex a condition 
from within : no w pre-established harmony " 



BURNS. 73 

existed between the clay soil of Mossgiel and 
the empyrean soul of Robert Burns ; it was 
not wonderful that the adjustment between 
them should have been long postponed, and 
his arm long cumbered, and his sight con- 5 
fused, in so vast and discordant an economy 
as he had been appointed steward over. 
Byron was, at his death, but a year younger 
than Burns; and through life, as it might 
have appeared, far more simply situated; 10 
yet in him too we can trace no such adjust- 
ment, no such moral manhood ; but at best, 
and only a little before his end, the begin- 
ning of what seemed such. 

41. By much the most striking incident 15 
in Burns's Life is his journey to Edinburgh ; 
but perhaps a still more important one is his 
residence at Irvine, so early as in his twenty- 
third year. Hitherto his life had been poor 
and toilworn ; but otherwise not ungenial,2o 
and, with all its distresses, by no means 
unhappy. In his parentage, deducting out- 
ward circumstances, he had every reason to 
reckon himself fortunate. His father was 
a man of thoughtful, intense, earnest char- 25 
acter, as the best of our peasants are, valuing 
knowledge, possessing some, and what is far 



74 BURNS. 

better and rarer, openminded for more : a 
man with a keen insight and devout heart ; 
reverent towards God, friendly therefore at 
once, and fearless towards all that God has 

5 made : in one word, though but a hard-handed 
peasant, a complete and fully unfolded Man. 
Such a father is seldom found in any rank 
in society ; and was worth descending far in 
society to seek. Unfortunately, he was very 

10 poor ; had he been even a little richer, almost 
never so little, the whole might have issued 
far otherwise. Mighty events turn on a 
straw ; the crossing of a brook decides the 
conquest of the world. Had this William 

is Burns's small seven acres of nursery-ground 
anywise prospered, the boy Robert had been 
sent to school ; had struggled forward as so 
many weaker men do, to some university ; 
come forth not . as a rustic wonder, but as 

20 a regular well-trained intellectual workman, 
and changed the whole course of British Lit- 
erature, — for it lay in him to have done this ! 
But the nursery did not prosper ; poverty 
sank his whole family below the help of even 

25 our cheap school-system: Burns remained a 
hard-worked ploughboy, and British litera- 
ture took its own course. Nevertheless, 



BURNS. 75 

even in this rugged scene there is much to 
nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his 
brother, and for his father and mother, whom 
he loves, and would fain shield from want. 
Wisdom is not banished from their poor 5 
hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling : the 
solemn words, Let us worship GW, are heard 
there from a " priest-like father ; " if threat- 
ening^ of unjust men throw mother and 
children into tears, these are tears not of 10 
grief only, but of holiest affection ; every 
heart in that humble group feels itself the 
closer knit to every other ; in their hard 
warfare they are there together, a "little 
band of brethren." Neither are such tears, 15 
and the deep beauty that dwells in them, 
their only portion. Light visits the hearts 
as it does the eyes of all living : there is a 
force, too, in this youth, that enables him 
to trample on misfortune; nay to bind it 20 
under his feet to make him sport. For a 
bold, warm, buoyant humor of character has 
been given him ; and so the thick-coming 
shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, 
friendly irony, and in their closest pressure's 
he bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague 
yearnings of ambition fail not, as he grows 



76 BURNS. 

up ; dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities 
around him ; the curtain of Existence is 
slowly rising, in many-colored splendor and 
gloom : and the auroral light of first love is 
6 gilding his horizon, and the music of song 
is on his path ; and so he walks 

. . . in glory and in joy, 
Behind his plough, upon the mountain side. 

42. We ourselves know, from the best 

io evidence, that up to this date Burns was 
happy ; nay that he was the gayest, bright- 
est, most fantastic, fascinating being to be 
found in the world ; more so even than he 
ever afterwards appeared. But now, at this 

is early age, he quits the paternal roof; goes 
forth into looser, louder, more exciting 
society ; and becomes initiated in those dis- 
sipations, those vices, which a certain class 
of philosophers have asserted to be a natural 

20 preparative for entering on active life ; a 
kind of mud-bath, in which the youth is, as 
it were, necessitated to steep, and, we sup- 
pose, cleanse himself, before the real toga of 
Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not 

25 dispute much with this class of philoso- 
phers ; we hope they are mistaken : for Sin 



BURNS. 77 

and Remorse so easily beset us at all stages 
of life, and are always such indifferent com- 
pany, that it seems hard we should, at any 
stage, be forced and fated not only to meet 
but to yield to them, and even serve for 5 
a term in their leprous armada. We hope it 
is not so. Clear we are, at all events, it 
cannot be the training one receives in this 
Devil's service, but only our determining to 
desert from it, that fits us for true manly 10 
Action. We become men, not after we have 
been dissipated, and disappointed in the 
chase of false pleasure ; but after we have 
ascertained, in any way, what impassable 
barriers hem us in through this life; how 15 
mad it is to hope for contentment to our 
infinite soul from the gifts of this extremely 
finite world ; that a man must be sufficient 
for himself; and that for suffering and 
enduring there is no remedy but striving 20 
and doing. Manhood begins when we have 
in any way made truce with Necessity ; 
begins even when we have surrendered 
to Necessity, as the most part only do ; but 
begins joyfully and hopefully only when 25 
we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity ; 
and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and 



78 . BURNS. 

felt that in Necessity we are free. Surely, 
such lessons as this last, which, in one shape 
or other, is the grand lesson for every mortal 
man, are better learned from the lips of a 

5 devout mother, in the looks and actions of 
a devout father, while the heart is yet soft 
and pliant, than in collision with the sharp 
adamant of Fate, attracting us to shipwreck 
us, when the heart is grown hard, and may 

10 be broken before it will become contrite. 
Had Burns continued to learn this, as he 
was already learning it, in his father's cot- 
tage, he would have learned it fully, which 
he never did ; and been saved many a lasting 

15 aberration, many a bitter hour and year of 
remorseful sorrow. 

43. It seems to us another circumstance 
of fatal import in Burns's history, that at 
this time too he became involved in the 

20 religious quarrels of his district; that he was 
enlisted and feasted, as the fighting man of 
the New-Light Priesthood, in their highly 
unprofitable warfare. At the tables of these 
free-minded clergy he learned much more 

25 than was needful for him. Such liberal 
ridicule of fanaticism awakened in his mind 
scruples about Religion itself; and a whole 



BURNS. 79 

world of Doubts, which it required quite 
another set of conjurors than these men to 
exorcise.. We do not say that such an intel- 
lect as his could have escaped similar doubts 
at some period of his history ; or even that 5 
he could, at a later period, have come 
through them altogether victorious and 
unharmed : but it seems peculiarly unfortu- 
nate that this time, above all others, should 
have been fixed for the encounter. For now, 10 
with principles assailed by evil example from 
without, by " passions raging like demons " 
from within, he had little need of sceptical 
misgivings to whisper treason in the heat 
of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he 15 
were already defeated. He loses his feeling 
of innocence ; his mind is at variance with 
itself; the old divinity no longer presides 
there ; but wild Desires and wild Repentance 
alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he 20 
has committed himself before the world ; his 
character for sobriety, dear to a Scottish 
peasant as few corrupted worldlings can 
even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of 
men; and his only refuge consists in trying 25 
to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a 
refuge of lies. The blackest desperation 



80 BURNS. 

now gathers over him, broken only by red 
lightnings of remorse. The whole fabric of 
his life is blasted asunder ; for now not only 
his character, but his personal liberty, is to be 

5 lost ; men and Fortune are leagued for his 
hurt; "hungry Ruin has him in the wind." 
He sees no escape but the saddest of all : 
exiled from his loved country, to a country 
in every sense inhospitable and abhorrent to 

10 him. While the "gloomy night is gathering 
fast," in mental storm and solitude, as well 
as in physical, he sings his wild farewell to 
Scotland : . 

Farewell, my friends ; farewell my foes ! 
15 My peace with these, my love with those : 
The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr ! 

44. Light breaks suddenly in on him in 
floods ; but still a false transitory light, and 

20 no real sunshine. He is invited to Edin- 
burgh ; hastens thither with anticipating 
heart ; is welcomed as in a triumph, and 
with universal blandishment and acclama- 
tion ; whatever is wisest, whatever is greatest 

25 or loveliest there, gathers round him, to gaze 
on his face, to show him honor, sympathy, 

6. "Hungry Ruin has him in thewtnd." Ruin, like a vol/, has him 
to windward. Burns was about to emigrate to the West Indies. 



BURNS. 81 

affection. Burns's appearance among the 
sages and nobles of Edinburgh must be 
regarded as one of the . most singular phe- 
nomena in modern Literature ; almost like 
the appearance of some Napoleon among the 5 
crowned sovereigns of modern Politics. For 
it is nowise as " a mockery king," set there 
by favor, transiently and for a purpose, that 
he will let himself be treated ; still less is he 
a mad Rienzi, whose sudden elevation turns 10 
his too weak head : but he stands there on 
his own basis; cool, unastonished, holding 
his equal rank from Nature herself; putting 
forth no claim which there is not strength in 
him, as well as about him, to vindicate. Mr. 15 
Lockhart has some forcible observations on 
this point : 

45. "It needs no effort of imagination," 
says he, "to conceive what the sensations of 
an isolated set of scholars (almost all either 20 
clergymen or professors) must have been in 
the presence of this big-boned, black-browed, 
brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, 
who, having forced his way among them from 
the plough-tail at a single stride, manifested 25 

10. Rienzi. An Italian patriot in the fourteenth century, who gained 
control of Rome, but on account of his excesses, was finally driven out 
by the people. 



82 BURNS. 

in the whole strain of his bearing and con- 
versation a most thorough conviction, that in 
the society of the most eminent men of his 
nation he was exactly where he was entitled 

5 to be ; hardly deigned to flatter them by 
exhibiting even an occasional symptom of 
being flattered by their notice ; by turns 
calmly measured himself against the most 
cultivated understandings of his time in dis- 

10 cussion ; overpowered the bonmots of the 
most celebrated convivialists by broad flood's 
of merriment, impregnated with all the burn- 
ing life of genius ; astounded bosoms habit- 
ually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of 

is social reserve, by compelling them to trem- 
ble, — nay, to tremble visibly, — beneath the 
fearless touch of natural pathos ; and all this 
without indicating the smallest willingness to 
be ranked among those professional minis- 

ioters of excitement, who are content to be 
paid in money and smiles for doing what the 
spectators and auditors would be ashamed of 
doing in their own persons, even if they had 
the power of doing it ; and last, and proba- 

2obly worst of all, who was known to be in 
the habit of enlivening societies which they 
would have scorned to approach, still more 






BURNS. 83 

frequently than their own, with eloquence no 
less magnificent ; with wit, in all likelihood 
still more daring : often enough, as the supe- 
riors whom he fronted without alarm might 
have guessed from the beginning, and had 5 
ere long no occasion to guess, with wit 
pointed at themselves." 

46. The farther we remove from this 
scene, the more singular will it seem to us : 
details of the exterior aspect of it are already w 
full of interest. Most readers recollect Mr. 
Walker's personal interviews with Burns as 
among the best passages of his Narrative : a 
time will come when this reminiscence of Sir 
Walter Scott's, slight though it is, will also 15 
be precious : 

47. "As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, 
"I may truly say, Virgilium vidi tantum. I 
was a lad of fifteen in 1786-87, when he came 
first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feelings 
enough to be much interested in his poetry, 
and would have given the world to know 
him : but I had very little acquaintance with 
any literary people, and still less with the 
gentry of the west country, the two sets that 25 
he most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson 

18. Virgilium vidi tantum. I have at least seen Virgil. 



84 BURNS. 

was at that time a clerk of my father's. He 
knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his 
lodgings to dinner ; but had no opportunity 
to keep his word ; otherwise I might have 

5 seen more of this distinguished man. As it 
was I saw him one day at the late venerable 
Professor Ferguson's, where there were sev- 
eral gentlemen of literary reputation, among 
whom I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald 

10 Stewart. Of course, we youngsters sat 
silent, looked and listened. The only thing 
I remember which was remarkable in Burns's 
manner, was the effect produced upon him by 
a print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier 

is lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in 
misery on one side, — on the other, his 
widow, with a child in her arms. These 
lines were written beneath : 

f Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
20 Perhaps that mother w T ept her soldier slain ; 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears.' 

26 48. "Burns seemed much affected by the 

7. Professor Ferguson. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), professor of 
philosophy at Edinburgh. 



BURNS. 85 

print, or rather by the ideas which it sug- 
gested to his mind. He actually shed tears. 
He asked whose the lines were ; and it 
chanced that nobody but myself remem- 
bered that they occur in a half-forgotten 5 
poem of Langhorne's called by the unprom- 
ising title of f The Justice of Peace.' I whis- 
pered my information to a friend present ; 
he mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me 
with a look and a word, which, though of 10 
mere civility, I then received and still recol- 
lect with very great pleasure. 

49. "His person was strong and robust; 
his manners rustic, not clownish ; a sort of 
dignified plainness and simplicity, which 15 
received part of its effect perhaps from one's 
knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His 
features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's 
picture ; but to me it conveys the idea that 
they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. 20 
I think his countenance was more massive 
than it looks in any of the portraits. I 
should have taken the poet, had I not known 
what he was, for a very sagacious country 
farmer of the old Scotch school, i. e. none 25 
of your modern agriculturists who keep 

6. Langhorne. John Langhorne (1735-1779). 



86 BURNS. 

laborers for their drudgery, but the douce 
gudeman who held his own plough. There 
was a strong expression of sense and shrewd- 
ness in all his lineaments ; the eye alone, I 
5 think, indicated the poetical character and 
temperament. It was large, and of a dark 
cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) 
when he spoke with feeling or interest. I 
never saw such another eye in a human 

10 head, though I have seen the most distin- 
guished men of my time. His conversation 
expressed perfect self-confidence, without the 
slightest presumption. Among the men who 
were the most learned of their time and 

15 country, he expressed himself with perfect 
firmness, but without the least intrusive for- 
wardness : and when he differed in opinion, 
he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet 
at the same time with modesty. I do not 

w remember any part of his conversation dis- 
tinctly enough to be quoted ; nor did I ever 
see him again, except in the street, where he 
did not recognize me, as I could not expect 
he should. He was much caressed in 

25 Edinburgh: but (considering what literary 
emoluments have been since his day) the 

1. Douce gudeman. Sober goodman. 



BURNS. 87 

efforts made for his relief were extremely 
trifling. 

50. " I remember, on this occasion I 
mention,! thought Burns's acquaintance with 
English poetry was rather limited ; and also 5 
that, having twenty times the abilities of 
Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, he talked of 
them with too much humility as his models : 
there was doubtless national predilection in 
his estimate. 10 

51. "This is all I can tell you about 
Burns. I have only to add, that his dress 
corresponded with his manner. He was like 
a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the 
laird. I do* not speak in malam partem, when 15 
I say, I never saw a man in company with 
his superiors in station or information more 
perfectly free from either the reality or the 
affectation of embarrassment. I was told, 
but did not observe it, that his address to 20 
females was extremely deferential, and always 
with a turn either to the pathetic or humor- 
ous, which engaged their attention particu- 
larly. I have heard the late Duchess of 
Gordon remark this. I do not know any- 25 
thing I can add to these recollections of forty 
years since." 

15. In malam partem. In bad part, with prejudice, 



88 BURNS. 

52. The conduct of Burns under this 
dazzling blaze of favor ; the calm, unaf- 
fected, manly manner in which he not only 
bore it, but estimated its value, has justly 
5 been regarded as the best proof that could 
be given of his real vigor and integrity of 
mind. A little natural vanity, some touches 
of hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings 
of affectation, at least some fear of being 

10 thought affected, we could have pardoned in 
almost any man ; but no such indication is 
to be traced here. In his unexampled situa- 
tion the young peasant is not a moment 
perplexed ; so many strange lights do not 

15 confuse him, do not lead him astray. Never- 
theless, we cannot but perceive that this 
winter did him great and lasting injury. A 
somewhat clearer knowledge of men's affairs, 
scarcely of their characters, it did afford him ; 

20 but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal 
arrangements in their social destiny it also 
left with him. He had seen the gay and 
gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are 
born to play their parts ; nay had himself 

25 stood in the midst of it ; and he felt more 
bitterly than ever, that here he was but a 
looker-on, and had no part or lot in that 



BURNS. 89 

splendid game. From this time a jealous 
indignant fear of social degradation takes 
possession of him ; and perverts, so far as 
aught could pervert, his private contentment, 
and his feelings towards his richer fellows. It 5 
was clear to Burns that he had talent enough 
to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, 
could he but have rightly willed this ; it was 
clear also that he willed something far dif- 
ferent, and therefore could not make one. 10 
Unhappy it was that he had not power to 
choose the one, and reject the other; but 
must halt forever between two opinions, 
two objects ; making hampered advancement 
towards either. But so it is with many men : 15 
we " long for the merchandise yet would fain 
keep the price ; " and so stand chaffering with 
Fate, in vexatious altercation, till the night 
come, and our fair is over ! 

53. The Edinburgh Learned of that 20 
period were in general more noted for 
clearness of head than for warmth of heart : 
with the exception of the good old Black- 
lock, whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely 
one among them seems to have looked at 25 
Burns with any true sympathy, or indeed 

23. Blacklock. Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet of Edinburgh. 



90 ' BURNS. 

much otherwise than as a highly curious 
thing. By the great also he is treated in 
the customary fashion ; entertained at their 
tables and dismissed : certain modica of 

5 pudding and praise are, from time to time, 
gladly exchanged for the fascination of his 
presence ; which exchange once effected, the 
bargain is finished, and each party goes 
his several way. At the end of this strange 

10 season, Burns gloomily sums up his gains 
and losses, and meditates on the chaotic 
future. In money he is somewhat richer; 
in fame and the show of happiness, infinitely 
richer ; but in the substance of it, as poor as 

15 ever. Nay poorer ; for his heart is now mad- 
dened still more with the fever of worldly 
Ambition ; and through long years the dis- 
ease will rack him with unprofitable suffer- 
ings, and weaken his strength for all true 

2 o and nobler aims. 

54. What Burns was next to do or to 
avoid ; how a man so circumstanced was 
now to guide himself towards his true 
advantage, might at this point of time have 

25 been a question for the wisest. It was a 
question too, which apparently he was left 
altogether to answer for' himself: of his 



BURNS. 91 

learned or rich patrons he had not struck 
any individual to turn a thought on this so 
trivial matter. Without claiming for Burns 
the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, 
that his Excise and Farm scheme does not 5 
seem to us a very unreasonable one ; that we 
should be at a loss, even now, to suggest 
one decidedly better. Certain of his admir- 
ers have felt scandalized at his ever resolving 
to gauge ; and would have had him lie at the 10 
pool, till the spirit of Patronage stirred the 
waters, that so, with one friendly plunge, 
all his sorrows might be healed. Unwise 
counsellors ! They know not the manner of 
this spirit; and how, in the lap of most 15 
golden dreams, a man might have happi- 
ness, were it not that in the interim he must 
die of hunger ! It reflects credit on the man- 
liness and sound sense of Burns, that he felt 
so early on what ground he was standing ; 20 
and preferred self-help, on the humblest 
scale, to dependence, and inaction, though 
with hope of far more splendid possibilities. 
But even these possibilities were not rejected 
in his scheme : he might expect if it chanced 25 
that he had any friend, to rise, in no long 
period, into something even like opulence 



92 BURNS. 

and leisure; while again, if it chanced that 
he had no friend, he could still live in secur- 
ity ; and for the rest, he " did not intend to 
borrow honor from any profession." We 

6 reckon that his plan was honest and well- 
calculated : all turned on the execution of 
it. Doubtless it failed ; yet not, we believe, 
from any vice inherent in itself. Nay, after 
all, it was no failure of external means, but 

10 of internal, that overtook Burns. His was no 
bankruptcy 'of the purse, but of the soul ; to 
his last day, he owed no man anything. 

55. Meanwhile he begins well : with two 
good and wise actions. His donation to his 

15 mother, munificent from a man whose income 
had lately been seven pounds a year, was 
worthy of him, and not more than worthy. 
Generous also, and worthy of him, was the 
treatment of the woman whose life's welfare 

2 o now depended on his pleasure. A friendly 
observer might have hoped serene days for 
him : his mind is on the true road to peace 
with itself: what clearness he still wants will 
be given as he proceeds ; for the best teacher 

2 5 of duties, that still lie dim to us, is the 
Practice of those we see and have at hand. 
Had the " patrons of genius," who could give 



BURNS. 93 

him nothing, but taken nothing from him, 
at least nothing more ! The wounds of his 
heart would have healed, vulgar Ambition 
would have died away. Toil and Frugality 
would have been welcome, since Virtue dwelt 5 
with them; and Poetry would have shone 
through them as of old : and in her clear 
ethereal light, which was his own by birth- 
right, he might have looked down on his 
earthly destiny, and all its obstructions, not 10 
with patience only, but with love. 

56. But the patrons of genius would not 
have it so. Picturesque tourists, all manner 
of fashionable danglers after literature, and, 
far worse, all manner of convivial Maecen-w 
ases, hovered round him in his retreat; and 
his good as well as his weak qualities secured 
them influence over him. He was flattered 

13. There is one little sketch by certain ~ English gentlemen " of this 
class, which, though adopted in Ctfrrie's Narrative, and since then re- 
peated in mostothers, we have all along felt an invincible disposition 
to regard as imaginary: u On a rock that projected into the stream, 
they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He 
had a cap made of fox-skin on his head, a loose greatcoat fixed around 
him by a belt, from which depended an enormous Highland broad- 
sword. It was Burns." Now, we rather think, it was not Burns. For 
to say nothing of the fox-skin cap, the loose and quite Hibernian 
watchcoat with the belt, what are we to make of this "enormous High- 
land broadsword" depending from him? More especially, as there is 
no word of parish constables on the lookout to see whether, as Dennis 
phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriff or that of the public! 
Burns, of all men. had the least need, and the least tendency, to seek 
for distinction, either in his own eyes, or those of others, by such poor 
mummeries — Note by Carlyle. 

15. Maecenases. Would-be patrons, like Maecenas, the Roman states- 
man who, through his friendship with Horace and Virgil, has gone 
down to posterity as the type of the wealthy, appreciative, and liberal 
patron. 



94 BURNS. 

by their notice ; and his warm social nature 
made it impossible for him to shake them off, 
and hold on his way apart from them. These 
men, as we believe, were proximately the 

5 means of his rain. Not that they meant him 
any ill ; they only meant themselves a little 
good, if he suffered harm, let him look to it ! 
But they wasted his precious time and his 
precious talent ; they disturbed his compo- 

10 sure, broke down his returning habits of 
temperance and assiduous contented exertion. 
Their pampering was baneful to him ; their 
cruelty, which soon followed, was equally 
baneful. The old grudge against Fortune's 

15 inequality awoke with new bitterness in their 
neighborhood ; and Burns had no retreat but 
to "the Rock of Independence," which is 
but an air-castle after all, that looks well at 
a distance, but will screen no one from real 

20 wind and wet. Flushed with irregular 
excitement, exasperated alternately by con- 
tempt of others, and contempt of himself, 
Burns was no longer regaining his peace of 
mind, but fast losing it forever. There was 

2 5 a hollowness at the heart of his life, for his 
conscience did not now approve what he was 
doing. 



BURNS. 95 

57. Amid the vapors of unwise enjoj'- 
ment, of bootless remorse, and angry dis- 
content with Fate, his true loadstar, a life of 
Poetry, with Poverty, nay with Famine if it 
must be so, was too often altogether hidden 5 
from his eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, 
where without some such loadstar, there was 
no right steering. Meteors of French Poli- 
tics rise before him, but these were not hit 
stars. An accident this, which hastened, but 10 
did not originate, his worst distresses. In 
the mad contentions of that time, he comes 
in collision with certain official Superiors ; is 
wounded by them; cruelly lacerated, we 
should say, could a dead mechanical imple-15 
ment, in any case, be called cruel : and 
shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self- 
se.clusion, into gloomier moodiness than ever. 
His life has now lost its unity : it is a life of 
fragments; led with little aim, beyond the 20 
melancholy one of securing its own continu- 
ance,— in fits of wild false joy when such 
offered, and of black despondency when they 
passed away. His character before the 
world begins to suffer : calumny is busy with 25 

8. Meteors of French Politics. Burns was in symt athy with the 
French Revolution, and a present of some guns to the French Conven- 
tion led to some trouble with his Excise Board. 



96 BURNS. 

him ; for a miserable man makes more 
enemies than friends. Some faults he has 
fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes ; but 
deep criminality is what he stands accused 

5 of, and they that are not without sin cast the 
first stone at him! For is he not a well- 
wisher to the French Kevolution, a Jacobin, 
and therefore in that one act guilty of all ? 
These accusations, political and moral, it has 

10 since appeared, were false enough: but the 
world hesitated little to credit them. Nay 
his convivial Maecenases themselves were not 
the last to do it. There is reason to believe 
that, in his later years, the Dumfries Aristoc- 

15 racy had partly withdrawn themselves from 
Burns, as from a tainted person, no longer 
worthy of their acquaintance. That painful 
class, stationed, in all provincial cities, 
behind the outmost breastwork of Gentility, 

20 there to stand siege and do battle against the 
intrusions of Grocerdom and Grazierdom, 
had actually seen dishonor in the society of 
Burns, and branded him with their veto ; had, 
as we vulgarly say, cut him! We find one 

25 passage in this Work of Mr. Lockhart's, 
which will not out of our thoughts : 

58. "A gentleman of that county, whose 



BURNS. 97 

name I have already more than once had 
occasion to refer to, has often told me that 
he was seldom more grieved, than when 
riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening 
about this time to attend a county ball, he 5 
saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side 
of the principal street of the town, while the 
opposite side was gay with successive groups 
of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together 
for the festivities of the night, not one of 10 
whom appeared willing to recognize him. 
The horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, 
who on his proposing to cross the street said : 
f Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over 
now ; ' and quoted, after a pause, some verses 15 
of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad : 

f His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, 
His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's 

new ; 
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 20 
And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. 
O, were we young as we ance hae been, 
We sud hae been gallopping down on yon 

green, 
And linking it ower the lily-white lea ! 25 

And werena my heart light, I wad die. 9 

It was little in Burns's character to let his 
feelings on certain subjects escape in this 



98 BURNS. 

fashion. He, immediately after reciting 
these verses, assumed the sprightliness of 
his most pleasing manner ; and taking his 
young friend home with him, entertained him 
5 very agreeably till the hour of the ball 
arrived." 

59. Alas ! when we think that Burns now 
sleeps "where bitter indignation can no 
longer lacerate his heart," and that most of 

io those fair dames and frizzled gentlemen 

already lie at his side, where the breastwork 

of gentility is quite thrown down, — who 

would not sigh over the thin delusions and 

• foolish toys that divide heart from heart, and 

15 make man unmerciful to his brother ! 

60. It was not now to be hoped that the 
genius of Burns would ever reach maturity, 
or accomplish aught worthy of itself. His 
spirit was jarred in its melody ; not the soft 

20 breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand 
of Fate, was now sweeping over the strings. 
And yet what harmony was in him, what 
music even in his discords ! How the wild 
tones had a charm for the simplest and the 

25 wisest ; and all men felt and knew that here 
also was one of the Gifted ! " If he entered 

9. Ubisceva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. Swift's Epitaph. 



BURNS. 99 

an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were 
in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from 
the cellar to the garret ; and ere ten minutes 
had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests 
were assembled ! " Some brief pure moments 5 
of poetic life were yet appointed him, in the 
composition of his Songs. We can under- 
stand how T he grasped at this employment ; 
and how too, he spurned all other reward 
for it but what the' labor itself brought him. 10 
For the soul of Burns, though scathed and 
marred, was yet living in its full moral 
strength, though .sharply conscious of its 
errors and abasement : and here, in his 
destitution and degradation, was one act of 15 
seeming nobleness and self-devotedness left 
even for him to perform. He felt too, that 
with all the "thoughtless follies" that had 
' f laid him low," the world was unjust and 
cruel to him; and he silently appealed to 20 
another and calmer time. Not as a hired 
soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for 
the glory of his country : so he cast from 
him the poor sixpence a day, and served 
zealously as a volunteer. Let us not 25 
grudge him this last luxury of his exist- 
ence ; let him not have appealed to us in 



100 BUKNS. 

vain ! The money was not necessary to 
him ; he struggled through without it : long 
since, these guineas would have been gone, 
and now the hi^h-mindedness of refusing 

5 them will plead for him in all hearts forever. 

61. We are here arrived at the crisis of 

Burns's life ; for matters had now taken such 

a shape with him as could not long continue. 

If improvement was not to be looked for, 

10 Nature could only for a limited time main- 
tain this dark and maddening warfare against 
the world and itself. We are not medically 
informed whether any continuance of years 
was, at this period, probable for Burns ; 

15 whether his death is to be looked on as in 
some sense an accidental event, or only as 
the natural consequence of the long series of 
events that had preceded. The latter seems 
to be the likelier opinion ; and yet it is by no 

20 means a certain one. At all events, as we 
have said, some change could not be very 
distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems 
to us, were open for Burns : clear poetical 
activity ; madness ; or death. The first, 

25 with longer life, was still possible, though 
not probable ; for physical causes were 
beginning to be concerned in it : and yet 



BURNS. 101 

Burns had an iron resolution ; could he but 
have seen and felt, that not only his highest 
glory, but his first duty, and the true medi- 
cine for all his woes, lay here. The second 
was still less probable ; for his mind was b 
ever among the clearest and firmest. So 
the milder third gate was opened for him : 
and he passed, not softly yet speedily, into 
that still country, where the hail-storms and 
fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest- 10 
laden wayfarer at length lays down his load ! 
VI. 
62. Contemplating this sad end of Burns, 
and how he sank unaided by any real help, 
uncheered by any wise sympathy, generous is 
minds have sometimes figured to themselves, 
with a reproachful sorrow, that much might 
have been done for him; that by counsel, 
true affection and friendly ministrations, he 
might have been saved to himself and the 20 
world. We question whether there is not 
more tenderness of heart than soundness of 
judgment in these suggestions. It seems 
dubious to us whether the richest, wisest, 
most benevolent individual could have lent 23 
Burns any effectual help. Counsel, which 
seldom profits any one, he did not need ; in 



102 BURNS. 

his understanding, he knew the right from the 
wrong, as well perhaps as any man ever did ; 
but the persuasion which would have availed 
him, lies not so much in the head as in the 

5 heart, where no argument or expostulation 
could have assisted much to implant it. As 
to money again, we do not believe that this 
was his essential want ; or well see how any 
private man could, even presupposing Burns's 

10 consent, have bestowed on him an indepen- 
dent fortune, with much prospect of decisive 
advantage. It is a mortifying truth, that two 
men in any rank of society, could hardly be 
found virtuous enough to give money, and to 

is take it as a necessary gift, without injury 
to the moral entireness of one or both. But 
so stands the fact : Friendship, in the old 
heroic sense of that term, no longer exists; 
except in the cases of kindred or other legal 

20 affinity, it is in reality no longer expected, 
or recognized as a virtue among men. A 
close observer of manners has pronounced 
"Patronage," that is, pecuniary or other 
economic furtherance, to be "twice cursed;" 

25 cursing him that gives, and him that takes ! 
And thus, in regard to outward matters also, 
it has become the rule, as in regard to inward 



BURNS. 103 

it always was and must be the rule, that no 
one shall look for effectual help to another ; 
but that each shall rest contented with what 
help he can afford himself. Such, we say, 
is the principle of modern Honor ; naturally 5 
enough growing out of that sentiment of 
Pride, which we inculcate and encourage as 
the basis of our whole social morality. 
Many a poet has been poorer than Burns ; 
but no one was ever prouder : we may 10 
question whether, without great precautions, 
even a pension from Royalty would not have 
galled and encumbered, more than actually 
assisted him. 

63. Still less, therefore, are we disposed 15 
to join with another class of Burns's admir- 
ers, who accuse the higher ranks among us of 
having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect 
of him. We have already stated our doubts 
whether direct pecuniary help, had it been 20 
offered, would have been accepted, or could 
have proved very effectual. We shall readily 
admit, however, that much was to be done for 
Burns ; that many a poisoned arrow might 
have been warded from his bosom ; many an 23 
entanglement in his path cut asunder by the 
hand of the powerful ; and light and heat, 



104 BURNS. 

shed on him from high places, would have 
made his humble atmosphere more genial ; 
and the softest heart then breathing might 
have lived and died with some fewer pangs. 

5 Nay, we shall grant farther, and for Burns it 
is granting much, that, with all his pride, he 
would have thanked, even with exag- 
gerated gratitude, any one who had cor- 
dially befriended him : patronage, unless 

10 once cursed, needed not to have been twice 
so. At all events, the poor promotion he 
desired in his calling might have been 
granted,: it was his own scheme, therefore 
likelier than any other to be of service. All 

15 this it might have been a luxury, nay it was 
a duty, for our nobility to have done. No 
part of all this, however, did any of them 
do ; or apparently attempt, or wish to do : 
so much is granted against them. But what 

20 then is the amount of their blame ? Simply 
that they were men of the world, and 
walked by the principles of such men ; that 
they treated Burns, as other nobles and other 
commoners had done other poets ; as the 

25 English did Shakespeare ; as King Charles 

25. As King Charles did Buthr. "The King quoted, the courtiers 
studied, and the whole party of the royalists applauded it. Every 
eye watched for the golden shower which would fall upon the author, 
who certainly was not without his part in the general expectation. 
But praise was his whole reward." 



BURNS. 105 

and his Cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip 
and his Grandees did Cervantes. Do men 
gather grapes of thorns ; or shall we cut 
down our thorns for yielding only a fence 
and haws? How, indeed, could the " nobil- 5 
ity and gentry of his native land " hold out 
any help to this " Scottish Bard, proud of 
his name and country?" Were the nobility 
r.nd gentry so much as able rightly to help 
themselves ? Had they not their game to pre- 10 
serve ; their borough interests to strengthen ; 
dinners, therefore of various kinds to eat and 
give ? Were their means more than adequate 
to all this business, or less than adequate? 
Less than adequate, in general; few of them is 
in reality were richer than Burns ; many of 
them were poorer; for sometimes they had 
to wring their supplies, as with thumbscrews, 
from the hard hand; and, in their need of 
guineas, to forget their duty of mercy ; which 20 
Burns was never reduced to do. Let us pity 
and forgive them. The game they preserved 
and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, the 
borough interests they strengthened, the little 

1. As King Philip did Cervantes. For the lo s or maiming of his 
hand (in the Battle of Lepanto, 1571, under Don John of Austria, 
against the Turks), his capture by the Algerine corsairs, and the 
circumstances under which he wrote "Don Quixote, see his Life. 
5. Hates. Fruit of the hawthorne. 
24. Borough. Political district. 



106 BURNS. 

Babylons they severally builded by the glory 
of their might, are all melted or melting back 
into the primeval Chaos, as man's merely sel- 
fish endeavors are fated to do : and here was 

5 an action, extending, in virtue of its worldly 
influence, we may say, through all time ; in 
virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time, 
being immortal as the Spirit of Goodness 
itself; this action was offered them to do, 

10 and light was not given them to do it. Let 
us pity and forgive them. But better than 
pity, let us go and do otherwise. Human 
suffering did not end with the life of Burns ; 
neither was the solemn mandate, "Love one 

15 another, bear one another's burdens," given 
to the rich only, but to all men. True, we 
shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage 
by our aid or our pity ; but celestial natures, 
groaning under the fardels of a weary life, 

20 we shall' still find; and that wretchedness 
which Fate has rendered voiceless and tune- 
less is not the least wretched, but the most. 
64. Still, we do not think that the blame 
of Burns's failure lies chiefly with the w r orld. 

25 The world, it seems to us, treated him with 
more rather than with less kindness than it 

19. Fardels. Burdens, bundles. 



BURNS. 107 

usually shows to such men. It has ever, we 
fear, shown but small favor to its Teachers ; 
hunger and nakedness, perils and revilings, 
the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice have, 
in most times and countries, been the 5 
market-price it has offered for Wisdom, the 
welcome with which it has greeted those who 
have come to enlighten and purify it. Homer 
and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles, 
belong to old days ; but the world's Martyr- 10 
ology was not completed with these. Roger 
Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dun- 
geons ; Tasso pines in the cell of a madhouse ; 
Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lis- 
bon. So neglected, so "persecuted they the 15 
Prophets," not in Judea only, but in all 
places where men have been. We reckon 
that every poet of Burns's order is, or 
should be, a prophet and teacher to his age ; 
that he has no right to expect great kindness 20 

11. Roger Bacon. An English monk of the thirteenth century, an 
ardent student of the natural sciences, and a great investigator, was 
imprisoned because his scientific writings were deemed heretical. 

12. Galileo (1564— 1642). The famous Italian scientist, the inventor of 
the telescope, was. for his advocacy of the Copernican theory that the 
sun, not the earth, was the centre of the planetary system, compelled 
to abjure his heretical opinions, and sentenced to imprisonment. 

13. Tasso (1544— 1595). The author of the great Italian epic "Jeru- 
salem Delivered," was confined in a mad-house for seven years, pos- 
sibly for political reasons, though his mind was undoubtedly unsound. 

14. Camoens (l r >24?— 1580). The great and unfortunate author of 
the Portuguese epic. "The Lusiads." 



108 BURNS. 

from it, but rather is bound to do it great 
kindness ; that Burns, in particular, experi- 
enced fully the usual proportion of the 
world's goodness ; and that the blame of his 

5 failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly with 
the world. 

65. Where, then, does it lie? We' are 
forced to answer : With himself; it is his in- 
ward, not his outward misfortunes that bring 

io him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it 
otherwise ; seldom is a life morally wrecked 
but the grand cause lies in some internal 
mal-arrangement, some want less of good 
fortune than of good guidance. Nature 

is fashions no creature without implanting in it 
the strength needful for its action and dura- 
tion ; least of all does she so neglect her 
masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul. 
Neither can we believe that it is in the power 

20 of any external circumstances utterly to ruin 
the mind of a man ; nay if proper wisdom be 
given him, even so much as to aflect its 
essential health and beauty. The sternest 
sum-total of all worldly misfortunes is Death ; 

25 nothing more can lie in the cup of human 
woe ; yet many men, in all ages, have tri- 
umphed over Death, and led it captive : con- 



BURNS. 109 

verting its physical victory into a moral 
victory for themselves, into a seal and im- 
mortal consecration for all that their past life 
had achieved. What has been done, may 
be done again : nay, it is but the degree and 5 
not the kind of such heroism that differs in 
different seasons : for without some portion 
of this spirit, not of boisterous daring, but 
of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial in all its 
forms, no good man, in any scene or time, 10 
has ever attained to be good. 

66. We have already stated the error of 
Burns : and mourned over it, rather than 
blamed it. It was the want of unity in his 
purposes, of consistency in his aims : the 15 
hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union 
the common spirit of the world with the 
spirit of poetry, which is of a far different 
and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns 
was nothing wholly, and Burns could be 20 
nothing, no man formed as he was can be 
anything, by halves. The heart, not of a 
mere hot-blooded, popular Versemonger, or 
poetical Restaurateur, but of a true Poet and 
Singer, worthy of the old religious heroic as 
times, had been given him : and he fell in 
an age, not of heroism and religion, but of 



110 BURNS. 

scepticism, selfishness and triviality, when 
true Nobleness was little understood, and its 
place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, alto- 
gether barren and unfruitful principle of 

5 Pride. The influences of that age, his open, 
kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of 
his highly untoward situation, made it more 
than usually difficult for him to cast aside, or 
rightly subordinate ; the better spirit that 

10 was within him ever sternly demanded its 
rights, its supremacy : he spent his life in 
endeavoring to reconcile these two ; and lost 
it, as he must lose it, without reconciling 
them. 

is 67. Burns was born poor; and born also 
to continue poor, for he would not endeavor 
to be otherwise : this it had been well could 
he have once for all admitted, and consid- 
ered as finally settled. He was poor, truly ; 

20 but hundreds even of his own class and order 
of minds have been poorer, yet have suffered 
nothing deadly from it : nay, his own Father 
had a far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny 
than his was ; and he did not yield to it, but 

25 died courageously warring, and to all moral 
intents prevailing, against it. True, Bums 
had little means, had even little time for 



BURNS. Ill 

poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation ; 
but so much the more precious was what 
little he had. In all these external respects 
his case was hard ; but very far from the 
hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery and 5 
much worse evils, it has often been the lot of 
Poets and wise men to strive with and their 
o-lory to conquer. Locke was banished as a 
traitor; and wrote his rr Essay on the Human 
Understanding" sheltering himself in a Dutch 10 
garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease when 
he composed " Paradise Lost " ? Not only 
low, but fallen from a height ; not only poor, 
but impoverished ; in darkness and with 
dangers compassed round, he sang his im-15 
mortal song, and found fit audience, though 
few. Did not Cervantes finish his work, a 
maimed soldier and in prison? Nay, was not 
the "Araucana," which Spain acknowledges 
as its Epic written even without the aid of 20 
paper ; on scraps of leather, as the stout 
fighter and voyager snatched any moment 
from that wild warfare ?. 

68. And what, then, had these men, 

8. Locke. John Locke (1632-1704), a celebrated English philosopher. 

19. "Araucana," Along Spanish epic of the sixteenth .century , by 
Alonzo de Ercilla -dealing with the Spanish expedition against Arauco, 
4 Aim. n which he anther took part, and during which he composed 
part of his poem under the circumstances to which Carlyle refers. 



112 BURNS. 

which Burns wanted ? Two things ; both 
which, it seems to us, are indispensable for 
such men. They had a true, religious prin- 
ciple of morals ; and a single, not a double 

5 aim in their activity. They were not self- 
seekers and self-worshippers ; but seekers, 
and worshippers of something far better than 
Self. Not personal enjoyment was their 
object; but a high, heroic idea of Keligion, 

10 of Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom, in one 
or the other form, ever hovered before them ; 
in which cause they neither shrank from 
suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it 
as something wonderful ; but patiently en- 

lsdured, counting it blessedness enough so to 
spend and be spent. Thus the " golden calf 
of Self-love," however curiously carved was 
not their Deity ; but the invisible Goodness, 
which alone is man's reasonable service. 

20 This feeling was as a celestial fountain, 
whose streams refreshed into gladness and 
beauty all the provinces of their otherwise 
too desolate existence. In a word, they 
willed one thing, to which all other things 

25 were subordinated and made subservient; 
and therefore they accomplished it. The 
wedge will rend rocks ; but its edge must be 



BURNS. 113 

sharp and single : if it be double, the wedge 
is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing. 

69. Part of this superiority these men 
owed to their age ; in which heroism and 
devotedness were still practised, or at leasts 
not yet disbelieved in : but much of it like- 
wise they owed to themselves. With Burns, 
again, it was different. His morality, in 
most of its practical points, is that of a mere 
worldly man ; enjoyment, in a finer or coarser 10 
shape, is the only thing he longs and strives 
for. A noble instinct sometimes raises him 
above this ; but an instinct only, and acting 
only for moments. He has no Religion ; in 
the shallow age, where his days were cast, 15 
Religion was not discriminated from the New 
and Old Light forms of Religion ; and was, 
with these, becoming obsolete in the minds 
of men. His heart, indeed, is alive with a 
trembling adoration, but there is no temple 20 
in his understanding. He lives in darkness 
and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, 
at best, is an anxious wish ; like that of 
Rabelais, "a great Perhaps." 

He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; 25 
could he but have loved it purely, and with 

24. Rabelais.' Francois Rabelais (1495? -1553). The great French 
satirist and humorist, author of " Gargantua " and " Pantagruel." 



114 BURNS. 

his whole undivided heart, it had been well. 
For Poetry, as Burns could have followed it, 
is but another form of Wisdom, of Religion ; 
is itself Wisdom and Religion. But this also 
5 was denied him. His poetry is a stray vag- 
rant gleam, which will not be extinguished 
within him, yet rises not to be the true light 
of his path, but is often a wildfire that mis- 
leads him. It was not necessary for Burns 
10 to be rich, to be, or to seem, "indepen- 
dent ; " but it was necessary for him to be 
at one with his own heart ; to place what 
was highest in his nature highest also in his 
life ; " to seek within himself for that con- 
sistency and sequence, which external events 
would forever refuse him." He was born a 
poet ; poetry was the celestial element of his 
being, and should have been the soul of his 
whole endeavors. Lifted into that serene 
20 ether, whither he had wings given him to 
mount, he would have needed no other ele- 
vation : poverty, neglect, and all evil, save 
the desecration of himself and his Art, were 
a small matter to him ; the pride and the 
25 passions of the world lay far beneath his 
feet ; and he looked down alike on noble 
and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that 



BURNS. 115 

wore the stamp of man, with clear recogni- 
tion, with brotherly affection, with sym- 
pathy, with pity. Nay, we question whether 
for his culture as a Poet poverty and much 
suffering for a season were not absolutely p 
advantageous. Great men, in looking back 
over their lives, have testified to that effect. 
"I would not for much," says Jean Paul, 
"that I had been born richer." And yet 
Paul's birth was poor enough ; for, in another 10 
place, he adds: "The prisoner's allowance is 
bread and water ; and I had often only the 
latter." But the gold that is refined in the 
hottest furnace comes out the purest ; or as 
he has himself expressed it, "the canary-bird 15 
sings sweeter the longer it has been trained 
in a darkened cage." 

71. A man like Burns might have divided 
his hours between poetry and virtuous indus- 
try ; industry which all true feeling sanctions, 20 
nay prescribes, and which has a beauty, for 
that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones : but 
to divide his hours between poetry and rich 
men's banquets was an ill-starred and inaus- 
picious attempt. How could he be at ease at 2s 

8. Jean Paid. Slohann Paul Friederich Richter (1763-1825). A cele- 
brated German humorist and mystic, known best by his pseudonym, 
Jean Paul, 



116 BURNS. 

such banquets! What had he to do there, 
mingling his music with the coarse roar of 
altogether earthly voices ; brightening the 
thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent 

5 him from heaven? Was it his aim lo enjoy 
life? Tomorrow he must go drudge as an 
Exciseman ! We wonder not that Burns 
became moody, indignant, and at times an 
offender against certain rules of society ; but 

10 rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, 
and run amuck against them all. How could 
a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others' 
fault, ever know contentment or peaceable 
diligence for an hour? What he did, under 

15 such perverse guidance, and what he forbore 

to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the 

natural strength and worth of his character. 

72. Doubtless there was a remedy for 

this perverseness ; but not in others ; only 

?oin himself; least of all in simple increase of 
wealth and worldly " respectability." We 
hope we have now heard enough about the 
efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make 
poets happy. Nay have we not seen another 

25 instance of it in these very days? Byron, 
a man of an endowment considerably less 
ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the 



BUHNS. 117 

rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an 
English peer : the highest worldly honors, 
the fairest worldly career, are his by inherit- 
ance ; the richest harvest of fame he soon 
reaps, in another province, by his own hand. 6 
And what does all this avail him? Is he 
happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, he has 
a poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite 
and the Eternal ; and soon feels that all this 
is but mounting to the house-top to reach 10 
the stars ! Like Burns, he is only a proud 
man; might, like him, have "purchased a 
pocket-copy of Milton to study the character 
of Satan ; " for Satan also is Byron's grand 
exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the 15 
model apparently of his conduct. As in 
Burns's case too, the celestial element will 
not mingle with the clay of earth ; both poet 
and man of the world he must not be ; vulgar 
Ambition will not live kindly with poetic 20 
Adoration ; he cannot serve God and Mam- 
mon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy ; nay 
he is the most wretched of all men. His life 
is falsely arranged : the fire that is in him is 
not a strong, still, central fire, warming into 25 
beauty the products of a world ; but it is the 
mad fire of a volcano ; and now — we look 



118 BURNS. 

sadly into the ashes of the crater, which ere 
long will fill itself with snow ! 

73. Byron and Burns were sent forth as 
missionaries to their generation, to teach it a 

5 higher Doctrine, a purer Truth; they had 
a message to deliver, which left them no 
rest till it was accomplished ; in dim throes 
of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering 
within them ; for they knew not what it 

io meant, and felt it only in mysterious antici- 
pation, and they had to die without articu- 
lately uttering it. They are in the camp of 
the Unconverted ; yet not as high messengers 
of rigorous though benignant truth, but as 

15 soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fel- 
lowship will they live there : they are first 
adulated, then persecuted ; they accomplish 
little for others ; they find no peace for 
themselves, but only death and the peace of 

20 the grave. We confess, it is not without 
a certain mournful awe that we view the 
fate of these noble souls, so richly gifted, 
yet ruined to so little purpose with all their 
gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral 

25 taught in this piece of history, — twice told 
us in our own time ! Surely to men of like 
genius, if there be any such, it carries with 



BURNS. U9 

it a lesson of deep impressive significance. 
Surely it would become such a man, fur- 
nished for the highest of all enterprises, 
that of being the Poet of his Age, to con- 
sider well what it is that he attempts, and 5 
in what spirit he attempts it. For the words 
of Milton are true in all times, and were 
never truer than in this : ' f He who would 
write heroic poems must make his whole life 
a heroic poem." If he cannot first so make 10 
his life, then let him hasten from this arena; 
: for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful 
perils, are fit for him. Let him dwindle into 
a modish balladmonger ; let him worship and 
besing the idols of the time, and the time will 15 
not fail to reward him. If, indeed, he can 
endure to live in that capacity ! Byron 
and Burns could not live as idol-priests, 
but the fire of their own hearts consumed 
them ; and better it was for them that they 20 
could not. For it is not in the favor of the 
great or of the small, but in a life of truth, 
and in the inexpugnable citadel of his own 
soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's strength 
must lie. Let the great stand aloof from 25 
him, or know how to reverence him. Beauti- 
ful is the union of wealth with favor and 



120 BURNS. 

furtherance for literature ; like the costliest 
flower-jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. 
Yet let not the relation be mistaken. A 
true poet is not one whom they can hire by 

5 money or flattery to be a minister of their 
pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, 
their purveyor of table-wit ; he cannot be 
their menial, he cannot even be their par- 
tisan. At the peril of both parties, let no 

10 such union be attempted! Will a Courser 
of the Sun work softly in the harness of a 
Dray-horse? His hoofs are of fire, and his 
path is through the heavens, bringing light 
to all lands ; will he lumber on mud high- 

w ways, dragging ale for earthly appetites from 
door to door ? 

74. But we must stop short in these con- 
siderations, which would lead to boundless 
lengths. We had something to say on the 

20 public moral character of Burns; but this 
also we must forbear. We are far from 
regarding him as guilty before the world, as 
guiltier than the average ; nay from doubt- 
ing that he is less guilty than one of ten 

25 thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid 
than that where the Plebiscita of common 

26. Plebiscita. The Latin word for the acts of the popular assembly; 
hence, popular judgments or decisions. 



BURNS. 121 

civic reputations are pronounced, he has 
seemed to us even there less worthy of blame 
than of pity and wonder. But the world is 
habitually unjust in its judgments of such 
men; unjust on many grounds, of which 5 
this one may be stated as the substance : It 
decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes ; 
and not positively but negatively, less on 
what is done right, than on what is or is not 
done wrong. Not the few inches of deflec-10 
tion from the mathematical orbit, which are 
so easily measured, but the ratio of these to 
the whole diameter, constitutes the real 
aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its 
diameter the breadth of the solar system ; oris 
it may be a city hippodrome ; nay the circle 
of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or 
paces. But the inches of deflection only are 
measured : and it is assumed that the diam- 
eter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, 20 
will yield the same ratio when compared 
with them ! Here lies the root of many a 
blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, 
Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens 
to with approval. Granted, the ship comes 25 

24. Swif/s and Rousseau*. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the author of 
'■ Gulliver's Travels;" and Rousseau (.1712-1778), tue great French novel- 
ist and reformer. 



122 BURNS. 

into harbor with shrouds and tackle dam- 
aged ; the pilot is blameworthy ; he has not 
been all-wise and all-powerful : but to know 
how blameworthy, tell us first whether his 
voyage has been round the Globe, or only tos 
Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. 

75. With our readers in general, with 
men of right feeling anywhere, we are not 
required to plead for Burns. In pitying 
admiration he lies enshrined in all our hearts, 10 
in a far nobler mausoleum than that one of 
marble ; neither will his Works, even as they 
are, pass away from the memory of men. 
While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on 
like mighty rivers through the country of» 
Thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and 
assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves ; this 
little Valcusa Fountain will also arrest 
our eye : for this also is of Nature's own and 
most cunning workmanship, bursts from the 20 
depths of the earth, with a full gushing 
current, into the light of day ; and often will 
the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear 
waters, and muse among its rocks and pines ! 

6. Ramsgate. A seaside resort in England. 

Me of Dogs. A peninsula on the River Thames, near London, 
England. 

18. Valcusa Fountain. Residence of retrach (1304-1374) in the Valley 
Vaucluse near Avignon — " one of those works of nature, which five 
centuries have been unable to disturb." Petrach wrote there his lyrics. 



TEN CENT 

C LASS ICS. I 

1. Gulliver's Travels. (Voyage to Lilliput.) 

2. Black Beauty. 

3. Cricket on the Hearth. 

4. Hiawatha. 

5. Robinson Crusoe. 

6. De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars. (Annotated.) 

7. Marmion. (Annotated. ) 
9. Autobiography of Franklin. (Annotated.) 

11. Lay of the Last Minstrel. " 

12. Tennyson's Princess. " 

13. Paradise Lost. I. and II. " 

14. Macbeth. " 
Twelfth Night." 
Henry VIII. 

The Tempest. " 
King Richard II. 
As You Like It. 

Merchant of Venice. '* 

Midsummer Night's Dream. " 

Julius Caesar. " 

Cymbeline " 

King John. ** 
Hamlet. 

Coriolanus. " 

King Henry V. " 

These books are the very best things I have seen of the kind 
and I hail their appearance as the beginning of better things 
for the children. 

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No. 4th Grade. {Continued.) 

105. Stories and Rhymes of Birdland. I. 

106. Stories and Rhymes of Birdland. II. 

107. Stories and Rhymes of Flowerland. I. 

108. Stories and Rhymes of Flowerland. II. 
125. Selections from Longfellow. 

5th Grade. 

23. Hawthorne's Three Golden Apples. 

24. Hawthorne's Miraculous Pitcher. 

33. The Chima;ra. (Hawthorne.) 

34. Paradise of Children. (Hawthorne.) 
92. Audubon. , 

97. Jefferson. 
102. Nathan Hale. 

6th Grade. 



85 



Legend of Sleepy Hollow. (Irving.) 
Rip Van Winkle, etc. (Irving.) 
King of the Golden River. (Ruskin.) 
We are Seven, etc. (Wordsworth.) 
Rab and His Friends. 
Christmas Eve. etc. (Irving.) 
Pied Piper of Hamelin. (Browning.) 
John Gilpin, etc. (Cowper.) 
Lady of the Lake. Canto. I. (Scott.) 
Declaration of Independence. 
Thanatopsis and Other Poems. 
The Minotaur. Hawthorne.) 
The Pygmies. (Hawthorne.) 




014 389 548 8 



vjrrcai oione race. ^Tiawtr, 
Snow Image. (Hawthorn 
Selections from Longfellow. 

7th Grade. 
Story of Macbeth. 
Lays of Ancient Rome. — i. 
Enoch Arden. (Tennyson.) 
Philip of Pokanoket 
TheVoya -ving.) 

Ancient Mariner. (Colerii 
Evangeline. (Longfellow.) 
Lady of the Lake. Canto II. 

8th Grade. 

The Deserted Village. (Goldsmith. 

Othello, etc. (Lamb.) 

The Tempest, etc. (Lamb.) 

L'Allegro and Other Poems. 

As You Like It. (Shakesp, 

Merchant of Venice. (ShakespeareS 

Henry the Eighth. (Shakespeare.) 

The Elegy, etc. (Gray.) 

Lady of the Lake. Canto III. 

Sir Roger De Coverley. 

Cotter's Saturday Night (Burns.) 

!. Sir Launfal. (Lowell.) 

;. The Prisoner of Chillon. (Byron.) 

J. Lady of the Lake. Canto IV. 

1. Lady of the Lake. Canto V. 

. Lady of the Lake. 



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